Defining Your Archiving Requirements

The first step in planning for archiving in a Lync Server 2013 deployment is determining the requirements. Start by answering the following questions about the environment:

• Which sites and users in the organization require archiving support?

• Will archiving be needed for internal communications, external communications, or both?

• Should archiving include IM, conferencing, or both?

• Is archiving critical enough that IMs and conferences shouldn’t be allowed to occur if archiving is unavailable?

• How long should archived materials be retained?

Answering these questions enables you to determine how the archiving policies should be created.

Archiving policies are used by Lync Server 2013 to make decisions around what content should be archived, for whom it should be archived, and for how long it should remain in the archive. When planning the archiving policies, keep in mind that there are three types of archiving policies, each with a different intended purpose:

• Global Archiving Policy—This default policy applies to all users and sites in the deployment. The available options include the archiving of internal communications, external communications, or both. This policy cannot be deleted.

• Site Archiving Policy—This policy enables or disables archiving for a specific site within Lync Server 2013. Typically when deploying site archiving policies, you should disable archiving in the global policy; otherwise, all sites effectively process the global policy.

• User Archiving Policy—This policy enables or disables archiving for a specific user within Lync Server 2013, regardless of the sites with which the user is associated. This type of policy is typically used in environments where only a specific class of users requires archiving.

In each of the Lync 2103 archiving policies, you can choose to archive IM only, conferences only, or both. If both site and user policies are implemented, user policies will override site policies.

The other decision that must be made when planning archiving policies is whether to implement critical-mode archiving. Critical mode enforces a behavior such that if archiving isn’t available, the system prevents IM and conferencing from occurring. Critical mode is configured in the Archiving Configuration tab within the Lync Server 2013 Control Panel.

Finally, when planning the archiving requirements, determine how long archived data should remain in the archive. By default, purging archives is not enabled. The purge period can be set to as low as 1 day or as high as 2,562 days (just over 7 years). You can also choose to purge only exported archiving data. This option purges records that have been exported and marked as safe to delete by the session export tool.