Active Directory and Journaling

Although there is no performance impact or special considerations about the impact of journaling on Active Directory®, it is important to understand how journaling uses Active Directory. As with almost all user and configuration data on which Exchange relies, journaling configuration data is stored in Active Directory. There are two relevant Active Directory attributes:

• heuristic: This attribute enables envelope journaling at the Exchange organizational level.
• msExchMessageJournalRecipient This attribute specifies the journal mailbox for the particular mailbox store.

Both of these attributes are read and cached by Directory Service Access (DSAccess), which is the local directory cache on each Exchange server. DSAccess is updated every 15 minutes; therefore, any configuration change you make to these attributes takes no more than 15 minutes to update on the local Exchange computer (you must also take into account replication for multiple domains).