EV support for Outlook 2010

From the outside looking in, i can tell you that the adoption and willingness to upgrade to Exchage 2010 has been surprisingly rapid for us as well, typically customers won't roll out huge changes to their environments till an SP1 level has come out, many organizations still even run Exchange 2000 and Windows 2000 servers with only the lack of support being what forces them to move.


Historically if you look at the willingness to upgrade from 5.5 to 2000, or 2000 to 2003 etc the willingness to upgrade to 2010 is significantly higher than previous versions, what i will disagree with as well, is that Exchange 2010 whilst a big improvement is not that far above and beyond Exchange 2007 as that was the biiggest architectural changes (CAS/HUB/Transport etc all being introduced)

As for running EV2007 client (not EV7) with Outlook 2010, I could be wrong, but partial support is not a solution and for many customers won't be entertained, after all many companies such as the one i work for have to distribute these clients to tens of thousands of users which have to be tested, packaged, deployed etc which also takes considerable amount of time, we wouldnt want to have to distribute yet another client to all of our users.

But really it comes down to the way that Outlook 2010 has changed how the Outlook Add-Ins have to interface with Outlook 2010 by changing this to OOM.
Now the problem with this is, between Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010, Microsoft have had three years to work on and develop those API's and hooks, however for developers, they have had limited time and limited documentation (which Microsoft is unfortunately infamous for) in which to be able to develop their outlook add-ins.

And again as mentioned when you consider the size of the client now, with Virtual Vault, Vault Cache etc, its not as simple as just changing a header and expecting everything to work, majorly significant development and even more QA has to be passed along to that, and each issue that is bought up by QA has to go back to Dev for a fix, and then more QA and regression testing be performed.

And also remember that EV has to be able to perform well with other new features added to outlook not seen in 2007 and 2003, Microsoft have the luxury of being able to change features, add features, change interfaces etc and take their time needed to perfect it, I think same courtesy needs to be extended towards developers who have to react and perform significant re-working of existing code.

As for the planning of the client, if you read the statement from Alex Brown it will be an EV9 SP1 client that introduces Outlook 2010 functionality, as for providing support for EV8, theres really no point considering EV9 clients with EV8 servers will most likely be compatible, so just roll out the EV9 client and that way if/when you upgrade to EV9 on the servers, you'll already have the functionality there
 

I entirely agree with wildman and Symantec have left a great many customers - including me - extremely unhappy.  I can quite understand the challenges to EV with Exchange 2010 and we are holding off our Exchange 2003 -> 2010 migration whilst we wait for EV9.  However, irrespective of Exchange 2010 the release of Office 2010 and particular Outlook 2010 was hardly a minor update and was much anticipated by lots of organisations. This makes the statement:

"EV 9.0 will included support for Exchange 2010 SP1 (not original release) but will not provide support for Outlook 2010."

all the more irritating each time I read it. I simply cannot understand the lack of any update to the EV 8 client to work with Outlook 2010, let alone the lack of planning for an EV9 client.  What kind of bizarre product strategy decides that an otherwise pretty good vaulting product should actually stop working for its primary customer - the end user? 

Presumably a result of the same extraordinary thinking as is demonstrated in the following statement by Nick Wade in http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/support-exchange-2010-symantec-enterprise-vault-coming :

"The adoption of Exchange 2010, even before Service Pack 1 has been interestingly rapid and out of sync with historical trends of pre-SP1 production deployments of Exchange Server and other things."

WHAT?  Probably the most important architectural update and improvement to the world's premier Windows-based messaging product for nearly a decade - and Symantec are surprised that people wanted to buy it?  If I was a shareholder, I think I'd have been organising a lynch mob after hearing that one ...


If anyone is still reading this I am actually using the 7.5.18918 add-in with OL 2010 which happily retrieves vaulted tems and,  if a user is configured to have an offline vault, this configuration is capable of downloading vaulted items into the offline cache (very important for us).  For search, direct access to the vault via a browser is perfectly acceptable as previously mentioned by Rob Wilcox.  The only issue I have is not being able to specifically manage the offline vault, as vaulted items are only ever downloaded after a prompt when they're opened; there doesn't appear to be any way of forcing a full sync of the offline vault without the EV menu options being available (unless anyone knows otherwise?).

If I've achieved this much with just an EV 7 client, then the fundamental functionality is there even if the UI isn't - so why on earth haven't Symantec done something at least for their Outlook 2010 customers ?!?
 

Just wanted to clarify what will and will not be included in the EV 9.0 release later this year.
As Scanner notes above, EV 9.0 is indeed planned to be Generally Available in Q3 this year with First Availability being available for customers currently on the beta program a couple of weeks prior to this date.
EV 9.0 will included support for Exchange 2010 SP1 (not original release) but will not provide support for Outlook 2010.

While Outlook 2010 has gone RTM, Enterprise Vault support will be provided in an upcoming release (but not EV 9.0 original release) later in the year.
As noted, it does take some time to provide support for a major release such as this including in this particular case a full port of the EV client to use the newer OOM (Outlook Object Model) and full QA testing of the solution. Therefore at the moment I don't have dates to communicate to you however you should expect to hear more information from us a litle later in the year