We’ve all done it from time to time, and we’ve all probably suffered the consequences - and we’re professionals! We shy away afterwards and feel a little bit foolish. What is it I’m talking about?
Manually archiving lots and lots of emails with the Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-in.
I know in my time at Symantec I worked on a few issues where there were quite bad problems and poor user experience caused by trying to manually archive thousands of items in a folder at one time. I’ve even done it several times myself, without thinking.
But what about you? What about the users that you look after?
Do users do this? Do they have a poor experience? When I’ve tried it recently (in order to write this blog post) I tried highlighting a bunch of items in Outlook 2010 with the EV 11 Outlook Add-in (and EV 11 server) and timing how long it took to archive the item, whether all items were archived successfully, and what the general experience was like. Here are my results:
| Items | Time (seconds) | Success? | Comments |
| 100 (Outlook Online) | 40 | Yes | Items are marked quite quickly, and control returns to Outlook after 5 seconds or so |
| 100 (Outlook Online) | 45 | Yes | |
| 500 | 90 | Yes | Items are marked quite quickly still, and control returns to Outlook after 10-15 seconds or so |
| 500 | 85 | Yes | |
| 1000 | 240 | Yes | Outlook became responsive after 40-50 seconds |
| 1000 | 250 | Yes | |
| 5000 | 830 | Yes | Takes 25 seconds for the pop-up asking me to confirm archiving to appear. 3.5 minutes before Outlook became responsive |
| 5000 | 790 | Yes |
Now the individual time that the archiving took isn't that relevant. What is relevant is that it got very bad, and it was consistently that way. As you can see it’s not a pretty sight. A long time ago (in a faraway place) I can remember suggesting a feature which limited the number of items that a user is allowed to archive. I thought I had already posted it to the forums, but couldn't find it.. So here is that idea on the Symantec Connect forums, from just now:
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/ideas/when-user-selects-many-items-archive-just-mark-them
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/ideas/limit-ability-manually-archive-x-items
So I ask again: Do you have users who do this? Should you try educating them? Or … you can vote up my ideas :)
