When you enable archiving, the Messaging Agent passes completed conversations to the Archive Agent for storage on disk. The Archive Agent saves the conversations, indexes them, and searches them when requested by authorized Messenger client users. If you do not need to archive everyone's conversations, you can set up a policy to determine whose conversations are archived and whose are not.
Archiving is optional. Because all users' conversations are stored together in the Messenger archive, archiving is only necessary if you need to retain conversations for legal reasons, for example to comply with a corporate e-mail retention policy that has been extended to instant messages.
The following sections help you enable and manage archiving in your Messenger system: