Journaling

As I mentioned in my last post – Server Roles – Hub Transport,  all messages that pass through Exchange 2007 environment end up passing through the Hub Transport Server(s). This is critical when using the journaling feature.

Journaling is the ability to record all communications in an organization. E-mail communications are one of many different communication mechanisms that you may be required to journal. It is not unique to Exchange, I personally used it with Domino Server but other mail services offer the same functionality.

The #1 use case in my view is the compliance world where companies are required by law (or regulation) to archive information for years (in some cases up to 7 years!). This mean keeping every email – sent or received, internal or external, with attachments or without them and in some cases appointments, tasks and instant messaging. Sound big and scary?

Journaling help messaging administrators to collect all this information at one point. Going back to the opening paragraph, given the fact that all the messages go through one point – Hub Transport make journaling easier and much more effective.

Let’s go over some of the technical aspects of journaling in Exchange 2007 using Microsoft TechNet. Journaling in Exchange Server 2007 makes use of the new role-based topology in Exchange. all messages are processed by Hub Transport servers when going to or coming from Mailbox and Unified Messaging servers, other Exchange systems, third-party applications, and the Internet. All Hub Transport servers contain a transport agent called the journaling agent, which is responsible for applying journal rules to messages. Since the journaling agent is located on the Hub Transport servers, it encounters and evaluates every message before the message reaches its recipient. The Journaling agent acts on messages after categorization—this ensures access to all the message’s recipient and sender attributes, and it allows the agent to determine if the message was sent directly to a recipient or if it was received via distribution group expansion. It can also tell whether the recipient was on the To, the Cc, or the Bcc lines of a message that originated from within the Exchange Server 2007 organization.

Journaling in Exchange 2007  has a great fine tuning ability. You can specify journaling rules which let you select specific users for journaling. Rules also let you determine the scope of messages to journal, with options for Internal, External, and Global. Using the rules you can configure journaling to collect a user’s e-mail, voicemail, and faxes all in his Inbox and make journaling more flexible and much more efficient.

There are 2 types of journaling:

• Standard journaling – enables the Journaling agent in Exchange 2007 to journal all messages sent to and from recipients and senders, located on a specific mailbox database on a computer running the Mailbox server role
• Premium journaling – enables the Journaling agent in Exchange 2007 to use rules that you can configure to match the specific needs.
  This journaling type requires Exchange Enterprise Client Access License (CAL)

Journal Reports is the message that exchange generate when a message matches a journal rule and is to be submitted to the journaling mailbox. You can read all about it here. Information that is available through journaling is processed by the journaling agent that tries to capture as much detail as possible about the original message and populate as many fields as it can in the journaling report.