One of the biggest changes introduced in Exchange 2010 was the inclusion of several new compliance and audit logging features. Over the years, many organizations have relied on third-party products for archiving and retaining of e-mail messages for legal protection and regulatory compliance. Fortunately, this function is now built into the product, along with some very powerful auditing capabilities that can track which users are accessing and modifying items in mailboxes and which administrators are making changes throughout the Exchange organization.

In this chapter, we'll look at some of the most common tasks related to compliance and audit logging that can be automated through the Exchange Management Shell. This includes managing retention polices, performing legal searches, and restoring items from mailboxes, along with generating detailed reports based on mailbox and administrator audit logs.