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Enterprise Vault™ Introduction and Planning

Last Published: 2023-09-05

Product(s): Enterprise Vault (14.5)

How to plan settings for retention categories

You can categorize archived items using retention categories. Settings for a retention category include the retention period, which defines how long items are stored for.

A retention category also includes settings that let you do the following:

Prevent automatic deletion of items at the expiry of the retention period.
Prevent user deletion of items.

Enterprise Vault comes with a single, predefined retention category called Default Retention Category. The retention period is forever.

You can create other retention categories as required. For example:

If you have documents that you must retain for ten years for legal requirements, you could create a new retention category, named Legal, with a retention period of ten years.
You might want to keep the minutes of your regular meetings for three years. In this case, create another new retention category, named Minutes, and give it a retention period of three years.

You select one of the retention categories, predefined or otherwise, to be the default for all archiving in the site.

If permitted, Outlook users can change the retention category for their Exchange Server mailbox or for selected folders. Because you may want to prevent Outlook users from archiving with particular retention categories, you can hide a retention category from the list of available retention categories. Users are still able to search for items that have been archived with retention categories that are now hidden.

Retention categories cannot be deleted, because they may still be assigned to items in archives.

Note that some Enterprise Vault features, such as the retention folders and classification features, can update the retention categories of archived items and prevent users from changing the categories. For more information on retention, see the Administrator's Guide.