I have a question that I can't seem to find a good answer for around Exchange 2010 retention tags and their use within 3rd party archive solutions and/or Exchange Archive boxes.
What I'm hoping to accomplish (as per directive) is to have a system whereby email is, by default, kept for X amount of years (whether in an "archive" or in the users' live mailbox). Users can, however, set custom retention tags (based on their applied retention policy) to keep email longer if necessary or even shorter if the policy allows.
The thing I've found though is that the Exchange retention tags appear to be nothing more than a way to just do some auto-cleanup on the user's part, and these retention tags don't seem to communicate with 3rd party mail archive solutions (such as the GFI Archiver which we currently employ).
I understand that Exchange 2010 has "Archive Mailboxes", but that doesn't really seem to be a true archive, in that user's can just go delete whatever they want at any time (it sounds more like a PST-replacement option).
Has anyone implemented Exchange 2010's custom retention tags and successfully implemented it with a 3rd party mail archiving solution? I'd be curious to know if it's possible and what others have found.