Exchange Online Archiving

Can't I just turn on Archiving in 365?

Exchange Online Archiving is very restrictive, and the following should be taken into account by any organisation considering using it:

• Maximum of 2 simultaneous eDiscovery searches.

• No access to mail on Litigation Hold

• No ability to access live email during an exchange online outage – Microsoft specifically recommend the use of 3rd party services to protect data (see section 6b)

• Unable to provide tamper evident email (unless litigation hold is universally active) as audit can be disabled without notification.

• Cannot prove which copy of an email is the original (if Litigation/In-Place hold is disabled)

• Cannot prove that an email was NOT sent or received (unless litigation hold is universally active and has always been)

• Cannot retain or archive email for leavers without an active M365 subscription.

Other limitations:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/ediscovery-limits-for-content-search?view=o365-worldwide

The above limitations are meaningful; however, we believe that the key differentiator between Office 365 Archiving and our Archive is the search functionality.

Office 365 search functionality is limited and unintuitive, many users already recognise that Outlook's native search is often slow and inaccurate when searching large mailboxes or folders.

Microsoft eDiscovery/Purview searches are extremely cumbersome. they take place in an unfamiliar user interface, where a user will click through around 12 different screens just to configure search parameters. Users must then wait for the search to complete, which often takes hours. Large searches must be exported to view all the results.

In contrast, our Archive search has a consistent UI across the outlook plugin and web interface, uses a single search pane that shows the number of results in real time as search parameters are being adjusted and completes searches in seconds even on exceptionally large volumes of email.

The primary purpose of an archive is to be used in a compliance scenario with potential legal ramifications. Therefore privileged users undertaking the search may well do so infrequently and under immense time pressure, so ease of use, speed and accuracy of results are all incredibly important.