Active Directory and Journaling

 

Although there is no performance impact or special considerations about the impact of journaling on Active Directory®, it is important to understand how journaling uses Active Directory. As with almost all user and configuration data on which Exchange relies, journaling configuration data is stored in Active Directory. There are two relevant Active Directory attributes:

  • heuristic   This attribute enables envelope journaling at the Exchange organizational level.

  • msExchMessageJournalRecipient   This attribute specifies the journal mailbox for the particular mailbox store.

Both of these attributes are read and cached by Directory Service Access (DSAccess), which is the local directory cache on each Exchange server. DSAccess is updated every 15 minutes; therefore, any configuration change you make to these attributes takes no more than 15 minutes to update on the local Exchange computer (you must also take into account replication for multiple domains).

Heuristic Attribute

The heuristic attribute is an attribute on the Exchange organization name object (Configuration\Services\Microsoft Exchange\Organization Name). Two values are recognized by Exchange journaling for this attribute: null, and the integer value, 512. If this attribute is not set (null), mailbox databases that are journal-enabled perform message-only journaling. After this value is set (integer value, 512), all mailbox databases in the Exchange organization that are journal-enabled perform envelope journaling. For more information about setting this attribute, see How to Manually Enable Envelope Journaling.

msExchMessageJournalRecipient Attribute

The msExchMessageJournalRecipient attribute is set when journaling is enabled on a mailbox database. This attribute is a mailbox database attribute and holds the distinguished name of the journaling mailbox. If the value is null, journaling is not enabled on that mailbox database. For information about enabling a mailbox database for journaling, see How to Enable Exchange Journaling.