Microsoft 365 Force Archival

Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving offers users enhanced archiving features. An archive mailbox is a specially designed mailbox that appears apace with the users' primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook on the Web Access (OWA). Users can access the archive correspondingly with their primary mailboxes. Also, they can explore both their archives and primary mailboxes.

Administrators can use the Exchange admin center (EAC) or remote Windows PowerShell to enable the archive facility for specific users.

Archive mailboxes in Exchange Online Archiving are replicated to quiet one database copies, in geographically dispersed Microsoft information centers, to provide information recuperation functionality just in case of a messaging infrastructure failure. For large-scale failures, commercial enterprise continuity control is initiated.

Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving is a Microsoft 365 cloud-based, enterprise-elegance archiving answer for agencies that have deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2019, Microsoft Exchange Server 2016, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 (SP2 and later), or enroll in positive Exchange Online or Microsoft 365 plans. Exchange Online Archiving assists those agencies with their archiving, compliance, regulatory, and eDiscovery demanding situations at the same time as simplifying on-premises infrastructure, and thereby lowering charges and easing IT burdens.

As a Microsoft online service, Exchange Online Archiving is designed to assist and meet the want for sturdy security, reliability, and consumer productivity.

As we all know, creating a customised policy in an Exchange Online archive takes some time for the propagation of the settings. Only after the complete propagation, the emails start moving to archive as per the policy assigned to the mailbox. But luckily, Microsoft operates our total mailbox with Folder Assistance. The Managed Folder Assistant (MFA) is a crucial aspect withinside the application of data governance regulations for Exchange Online mailboxes. Not only does MFA observe Exchange mailbox regulations to mailboxes, it additionally applies Office 365 retention regulations and DLP regulations. And it makes certain that Teams compliance statistics are wiped clean in line with the Teams-most effective retention regulations.

Exchange Online makes use of a work cycle coverage to run MFA. The intention is to manage mailboxes as a minimum on a weekly basis. Experience is that MFA normally plays higher than this and that you could assume to have mailboxes processed twice a week. However, aside from noticing that a few messages were moved from a folder (possibly to the Deleted Items folder), there’s no apparent outward signal that MFA has processed a mailbox. Unless you examine the mailbox properties, where  Exchange notes the progress of MFA.

However force-restarting the MFA work cycle can solve multiple problems,eg. Cache related issues and other rule based propagation issues. Here we will apply MFA to force start archival for a particular mailbox. 

Prerequisites:

• Retention Tag and customer archival policy should be created and assigned to the concerned mailbox.
• Archive must be active for the concerned mailbox.
• If the concerned mailbox is in Exchange Plan 2, E3, E5 or any other plan having Unlimited Archival, and having archive requirement for more than 95 GB, then it's recommended that you should start the Auto-Incremental Archive Forcefully using powershell by running the following command.

Enable-Mailbox (USER_EMAIL_ID) -AutoExpandingArchive

Powershell Code to Force Start Archival:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

$UserCredential = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session

$id = Read-Host “ Enter the mailbox principal user name (Email Id) for which archival needs to be activated forcefully :: “

Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Identity $id

How to Apply:

• Open Powershell in Administrator mode. (It’s preferred to use Powershell ISE in Administrator mode. As depicted in the figure below.)

• Paste the above code in the Editor window.
• Click on the RUN button to start execution of the code.

• Enter the Global Admin credentials on the Pop-up.

• Wait for the Session to get imported.

• Execution will complete by itself. Now open https://protection.office.com/archiving and wait for 5 minutes after selecting the concerned user to see the changes in the archival storage.