‘Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need… Journal Archives!’

Explaining the Transvault Compliance Time Machine for journal archive migrations to Office 365

As you may know, Office 365 does not have a concept of a single instanced journal archive to store a copy of every email sent and received.

In fact, for a short time, if you were an organization that needed to meet compliance needs with regard to email capture and eDiscovery you would have the expense and inconvenience of maintaining your journal archive using Exchange on-prem or using a 3rd-party cloud service running alongside Office 365.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has been busy fleshing out its Office 365 capability to meet compliance email retention needs, with the addition of features including:

• The option to put all items on indefinite Litigation/In-Place Hold, even if they’re deleted
• The ability to Indefinitely retain inactive mailboxes
• Preservation of BCCd and distribution list members in message headers
• The ability to hide the above information from users, but make it visible to eDiscovery

Combined with ongoing eDiscovery enhancements, Office 365 is now becoming a one-stop-shop for organizations with a compliance remit.

What to do with an organization’s legacy journal archive?

But the problem remains, what to do with an organization’s legacy journal archive? This crucial data, often multiple terabytes in volume, underpins an organization’s regulatory compliance stretching back years before Office 365 was ever an option.

With Transvault Time Machine you can take the contents of the old Journal format and map it onto Microsoft’s new Office 365 model.

This means Office 365 can now serve as a complete proposition for compliant archiving, covering the whole life of a company’s legacy data and storing it in such a way as to remain efficiently discoverable.

The Time Machine does all the work to convert single-instance messages back into multi-instance messages, creating a message for every recipient listed in the original message created.  It also creates a copy for the sender, along with all the relevant BCC and Distribution list information stored in the new header format.

Time Machine also leverages the Office 365 Inactive Mailbox capability to preserve the emails sent and received by staff no longer with the company.

Working in close collaboration with Microsoft, there are lots of other clever features in Time Machine designed to help organizations cope with the passing of time!

The end result is that it’s like you’ve been using the new Office 365 compliance model for the last 10 years or more!

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you require further explanation or want to explore a TimeMachine opportunity with Transvault.