Archive Calendar items with EV 7

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/evpm-calendar-items

Even better than EVPM you can used Exchange Managed Folders.  When you identify a policy for the Calendar folder and enable EV to use Managed Folders EV will then create a special retention category for the Calendar items and when they are archived the will get the associated retention category.

Managed Folders has the additional feature of being dynamic.  EVPM is a point-in-time tool.  With Managed Folders you would only have to create the policy in Exchange and it would be applied to all (or a defined subset) users.  EVPM would have to be rerun periodicallly to put the policy in newly created mailboxes.

I'd advise you to upgrade to EV8/EV9 before you start with calendar archiving, as I recall some bugs related to it...

Cheers

Thanks for the response.  However, I am a little bit confused now.  So the only way to archive calendar item with a different age than email is to use EVPM?  If we have to do it on a regular basis, that means we have to schedule a window task to do it rather than using the EV scheduler.  We are not too familiar with EVPM scripting.  Does it also set the retention period?  I can see that it will confuse whoever going to maintain the system in a long run,  not being able to schedule the archiving tasks at the same place.

Also, the technote http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/288059.htm mentioned that EV does not delete calendar items from Exchange after they have been archived.  Can anyone confirm that?  So after the retention period has expired, the archived calendar items would be deleted, but the actual items still remain in Exchange?  Has anyone tried to archive and cleanup calendar this way?  Please share your experience.

Thank you.

There are some things to remember about Managed Folders though, remember that Managed Folders require an extra CAL per mailbox (i heard this may change though? not sure)

Also Managed Folders have taken over from Exchange Mailbox Manager and a lot of companies will get the Managed Folder a retention of say 30 days, after 30 days all items will be deleted.

Well if you have that set to 30 days, the EV will copy that retention and suddenly you're expiring items after 30 days, as opposed to a 1 year archive that you wanted

But regardless, Managed Folders is for Exchange 2007 and based on the fact that you're on Enterprise Vault 7 it would suggest you are on Exchange 2003 (or even Exchange 2000)

But agree with Michael, you will really want to upgrade to the latest version of EV as there was a lot of fixes around Calendar items

You are correct in that EV doesn't delete calendar items, what it does is it either archives them (a straight copy) or replaces the calendar item with a copy and strips the attachment, leaving behind a link.

Most calendar items become huge because of the countless word documents, pdf's , excel spreadsheets, power point presentations etc that people embed, so it really does save a lot of space.

At one point in time, EV did used to replace the calendar items with shortcuts, but they added a layer of complexity and issues with the product, though I believe in EV8+ they resolved expiring non EV shortcuts (in terms of calendar items that needed to be expired)

you could also use Exchange Mailbox Manager to remove them after a certain age too.

As far as the EVPM settings go, you would set this up once per user.
The only time you would need to run it again would be if you zapped their mailbox (a process which removes all hidden settings set by EV policies, as well as filters put in place by EVPM etc)

you can choose the behavior between Exchange Managed Folders and EV archiving in your EV archiving policy.

Off - managed folders are ignored

Normal - managed folders are treated like normal folders

Managed - managed folders settings are synchronized from exchange

agreed, but in this scenario if you wanted to use Managed Folders in leui of EVPM you would use the Managed setting

Hi there,

we have the following (in my opinion same so you might adapt the idea) plan and had our idea confirmed by our consulting partner, but not put into place yet, but tested successfully:

- archive all calendar items with attachments during "normal" archive run according to age 4 weeks when any kind of item is archived, leave shortcut (non-shortcut-item respectively); standard retention
- archive any calendar item no matter with or without attachment according to age 2 years, do not leave a shortcut, retention is 1 year

We only run general archiving once a week (e.g. Friday night), provisioning and synchronisation twice a day.
So we set up a second archiving period (e.g. Tuesday night) after one provisioning and synchronisation task have completed where different user properties might lead to a different provisioning due to group membership - the group membership relies on a separate scheduled job modifying AD group memberships (outside EV). Thus another mailbox policy is fulfilled where only calendar items are archived in the way planned.
The provisioning group needs to be on high priority level so you do not have to switch any further properties of the user.
After this 2nd archive schedule the scheduled task has to clean the AD group membership again, next provisioning and synchronisation task reset to the "normal" archive mailbox policy.

We are using EV 8.3 but it could be possible with 7.5 already.

If you don't feel this might help in your case I am still interested in any other feedback to our idea.
Thanks,
Constanze

P.S.: EVPM scripting did not solve it. Symantec support had no solution as we had opened a ticket on that earlier. Exchange managed folders "are bad"...