Retention Category Properties: General

A retention category specifies the minimum amount of time for which an item must be retained. This length of time is the retention period. Expiry of the retention period can be based on the Modified date or Archived date.

By assigning a retention category to items at the time they are archived, it is possible to categorize stored items. This categorization makes it easier to retrieve items because it is possible to search by category.

Users can select retention categories for mailbox folders or items so that, when archiving occurs, items are stored with the appropriate retention category.

If you later modify a retention category, the changes are retrospective. For example, if you have a retention category called Customer Accounts with a retention period of 5 years, and you change the retention period to 10 years, items that have been already archived with the Customer Accounts retention category are retained for a minimum of 10 years.

Enterprise Vault can automatically delete expired items.

See Expiry and Deletion.

Name. You can modify the retention category name as needed. The new name is used immediately, so users of the Web Access application must search using the new name to find items stored with this retention category.

Details:

Description. This is a description of the retention category. Make sure that the description you give here is meaningful to users.
Retention period. This is the minimum amount of time to retain an item that has been archived using this retention category.

Select Retain items forever if you want items never to expire.

Settings:

Prevent deletion of archived items in this category. Select this to prevent the deletion of items that have been archived using this retention category. This protection applies during the retention period, and also after the retention period has expired. In other words, while this option remains selected, neither storage expiry nor users can delete items that have been stored using this retention category.

This setting affects only those items that are stored in archives. It does not affect items that are still in Microsoft Exchange Server.

Note:

This setting does not prevent applications that use the Enterprise Content Management API from deleting items with this retention category.
Hide this category from users. Select this to prevent users using this category when archiving new items. The category is still available to users when they are searching for items that have already been archived.

Note:

Enterprise Vault does not allow the Site default retention category to be hidden from users.
Lock this Retention Category. To prevent unintentional changes, select this to lock all the retention category settings. To modify a setting when Lock this Retention Category is selected, clear Lock this Retention Category and then modify the setting as required.

Base expiry on:

Inherit from Site settings. The retention period is inherited from the Site default retention category settings.
Modified date. The retention period is based on the date when the item was last modified. For mail messages, a retention period that is based on the Modified date is the time since the message was sent or received. For documents, it is the time since the document was last modified.
Archived date. The retention period is the time since the item was archived.

Administrative note. For your notes. Edit this text as necessary. This text is visible only to Enterprise Vault administrators.