Paranoid Boss 1

[paulpr90]

Hi All,

I have a customer who would like to be able to read all his employees email as he has had problems in the past.

He uses SBS 2003 with exchange. Is there an easy way to do this I am not fully competent with exchange as yet and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks.

Paul...

 

[TomLet]

Hi Paul,

You could use the archive feature in Exchange.
Open Exchange System Manager
-> Administrative Groups
-> First Administrative Group
-> Servers
-> [ServerName]
-> First Storage Group

Right click on Mailbox Store and select properties. The item you want is on the General tab. Put a check in the archive all messages box and supply a mailbox for it to be sent to. I'd recommend creating a special mailbox just for the archiving and add the box to the customers outlook profile. that way it's separate from all the other mail he receives. You mail also want to enable the mailbox manager on that mailbox to keep the size down. I hope this helps!

Tom

 

[markdmac]

Using the Journal feature in SBS could put your disk space in jeapardy since it will double the info store size. I would instead assign the manager rights to each users mailbox. They can then easily use OWA or open an additional mailbox in Outlook to look over the mail.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

 

[Freedom99]

I would disagree with you Marc. Giving access to the user to view other mailboxes could be tedious.
If the user arranges the archive mailbox correctly, the user could see mail (all mail) in any way they desire.
We use the same set up and granting access to other mailboxes can create "read" mail and "read" receipts.
Even if this is not a covert operation, it can create confusion amongst employees.

Thanks.

 

[br0ck]

gfi.com

look at mail archiver

it uses the journal feature in exchange but dumps the mail into a SQL Database

with this you can setup access to view other users mailboxes
from the web interface

it also does not allow users to delete e-mails

this is a very good tool for the Paranoid Boss!!

 

[markdmac]

Freedom99 I don't disagree with you that Journaling is a great feature to do this task, but I question if you are aware of the limitations of SBS.

SBS only ships with Exchange Standard version and is bundled as Windows 2003, Exchange 2003, SharePoint and in SBS Premium it also includes SQL and ISA.

All of that running on a single server running the entire business. Journalling will double the size of the Info store. Most small businesses can not afford that hit. And since it is Exchange Standard you can't create a second info store to isolate specific users to be or not be journaled. Because of disk space and performance reasons it is just not a good fit for an SBS environment.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

 

[rliebsch]

Agreeing with mark on this:

similar to the way you would give veritas backup exec or the blackberry user account full access to the mailstore, you could create such access for a user to all mailboxes very easily.

I don't see the tediousness mentioned above, if done correctly, this access is granted in one place.

The performance hit, the size of the database and accompanying disk usage, the backup, and maintenance of doubling each message would be great. Thought the GFI solution is good, again, you run into implementing, managing and maintaining the SQL database, thus increasing your administrative overhead, disk usagage and memory requirements. Remember your disaster recovery plans as well.



Robert Liebsch
Stone Yamashita Partners

http://www.stoneyamashita.com/

 

[ntinlin]

I'm surprised Mark hasn't mentioned the legal stuff.

No matter how paranoid the boss has to make sure all staff are aware that e-mail is considered company property and can be monitored at any time for any reason.

Just in case.

Neill

 

[markdmac]

Good point Neil. Always good to mention it ahead of time.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark