Gathering EX Statistics on Archived Email Retrieval

Hello.

EX 4.81.1459

Exchange 2003

Is it just me or does anyone else out there want to know HOW your userbase is USING the email archive system?

For example, if you have not implemented deletion policies, quotas and guidelines for email retention, how can you determine what your users are actually accessing from the millions of messages you are actually paying to store on storage in probable realtime?

We have no deletion or retention policies.  I have been trying to find a way to gather statistics on what shortcuts are actually accessed and what emails are accessed through the EmailXtender Plugin for Outlook.

What I have found so far is that the IIS server log on the EX server does list what user name is requesting information, what the email address of the requesting person is, what the computer name is, what the IP address of the computer is.  Also listed are two long strings of numbers:

MAPIFLDREID

ENTRYID

When I search for the MAPIFLDREID and ENTRYID in EX Search, no results were found.  Worth a shot.

My question is, using the activity data provided in the IIS log, is there any way to query the SQL server to get back the following information:

1. Owner(s) of Message

2. Date of Message

3. Size of Message

4. Username requesting retrieval.

Once it is determined whether this is even possible, a bulk/faster method for gathering the data will need to be created, since in a given day there are hundreds of hits.

With this information, we would be able to say, for example, that no users are accessing data that is more than x years old. We would also know what % of our userbase actually use the archive system.