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KennyStern-7712 avatar image
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KennyStern-7712 asked ElmadjirAbdallah-0647 answered

Questions about retention tags/policies

Trying to create a retention policy but not able to do what I want. We are in a hybrid environment but this is specific to Exchange Online.
We would like email to get moved to the online archive after one year but would like to exclude calendar from this. The problem is we have executive assistants who manage their boss's calendars and often need to search the calendars for old items. If the calendar is in the online archive they cannot access it unless they have full mailbox access, which is not desirable.

I've read that the only way to do this by using a personal tag to "never move to online archive' and have users apply that tag to their calendar folders but that has a lot drawbacks:

  1. I don't see a way to apply that tag to the calendar folder. Can it be done? If so, how? If we can figure this out we can probably work around the other issues.

  2. If number 1 can be done it would still have to be done by the users, or we can use EWS. Is that right? Because if we rely on the user to do it and they don't, all old calendar items will be moved to online archive next time the managed folder assistant runs with no easy way to move them back.

So is it possible to have a retention policy that moves everything to online archive after one year but exclude calendar?

Also, in Outlook I see Assign Policy in the ribbon. The options here are as follows:
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Where are these coming from? These tags don't exist in our Default MRM Policy.

office-exchange-online-itprooffice-exchange-hybrid-itpro
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ElmadjirAbdallah-0647 avatar image
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ElmadjirAbdallah-0647 answered

I applied 2 Tags : 1 to delete message after 1 week and second one will do directly to the Archive after 1 week . both them I add to the Retention policies for my mail box . So my question is which one will have action first ?

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SamEnnekens-6689 avatar image
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SamEnnekens-6689 answered

Hi, has there been found a solution yet about this topic? I'm having a similar problem. I want to exclude the calender from being archived using a retention tag. Default Policy tag moves everything older than X years to the in-place archive. We want to exclude Calendar items to be archived, unfortunately a RPT tag does not have the 'move to archive' option.

Thank you for your reply!

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YukiSun-MSFT avatar image
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YukiSun-MSFT answered YukiSun-MSFT commented

Hi @KennyStern-7712,

So is it possible to have a retention policy that moves everything to online archive after one year but exclude calendar?

As far as I know, there's a registry setting "ELCAssistantCalendarTaskRetentionEnabled" which can be used to exclude Calendar and Task folders from the retention policy, see this blog. But further research indicates that it may not be applicable for Exchange Online. See discussion in this thread.

That being said, agree with Michev that you can take a look at the possibility to apply personal tag to the Calendar folders via EWS. A per your concern about if it can be done with Exchange Online, I tried to search around and found the following blog which mentions using EWS to assign personal tags to default folders in Exchange Online environment, hopefully that could be of some help:
Use EWS to apply retention policy to items in a default folder
Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.


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It does look like that registry key would need to be added to the mailbox server, so not really a way to add it to Exchange online. I will send that other link to our development team. Looks like exactly what we are trying to do with calendar items. Unfortunately they will not be able to work on this until after Jan. 6. I will report back and let you know if it works. Thanks a lot.

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My pleasure. Hope it can work :)

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michev avatar image
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michev answered michev commented

Outlook/OWA do not expose the retention tags menu for Calendar, so doing it programmatically via EWS is your best option.

As for the other question, those are personal tags, they dont need to be assigned to any policy in order to be used.

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So I want to be sure I understand. We can apply personal retention tags to Calendar? Just can't do it through Outlook or OWA?
And if we wanted to make sure this got applied before calendar items get moved I guess we should leave the DPT that moves to online archive out of the policy until after we get this applied to all users?
And that would accomplish what we are trying to do?

Thanks so much. This could potentially solve a big problem for us.

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According to Exchange Online / M365 support the ability to apply a personal tag to the calendar folder using EWS is only possible with Exchange on-premise. I am on the phone with them right now. Do you know if that is true? Seems to contradict what you said so I'm just trying to determine if this can really be done with Exchange online. Thanks

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