Restoring emails

Sorry, I didn't mean to export to pst, I mean whilst using the Enterprise Vault add-in within Outlook.  Let's say you have a policy to auto archive to EV after a month.  You want an email to be permanently within your Exchange mailbox.  When you use the restore button within the EV Outlook add-in, does it move it to the Exchange or just bring across a copy to a local EV cache?

The Export Archive Wizard can also export back to the mailbox, not just PST.

But from the Outlook if you use the Outlook Add-in and click on Restore. A copy of that mail is put back either over the top of the shortcut or in the Restored Items folder (depending on the client you have installed, and the mode it is operating in ... eg full or light). It will still exist in the archive. It will sit in the respective folder until the policy is next active, in your example, it would be a month.

Some customers create a folder on each mailbox called 'Do Not Archive', and use EVPM to do that and set a property on the folder saying 'Do Not Archive' (again using EVPM).  Then any items in that folder don't get archived.

Ok, this may be a long post so grab a cuppa

We have a client that is moving away from Enterprise Vault as Exchange will cater for their basic needs.  What we would like to do, is migrate the mailboxes within the standard SBS migration procedure.  Once this is done, we would like to use the export archive wizard to bring across all the mail within Enterprise Vault across to their Exchange mailboxes smoothly without having to export to .pst files and have to visit each machine.

I wasn't part of the initial install so don't know how much Enterprise Vault ties into their Active Directory/Exchange.  Would this above work, or would it simply fail as Enterprise Vault is configured to communicate with their current SBS 2003 Exchange?  If so, could this be modified within Enterprise Vault to point to the new SBS 2011 Exchange?

My suggestion would be to use the Export Archive Wizard and export everything back to each mailbox in turn.  However, be aware that this will have disk space implications on the Exchange side.

Once there..  all the shortcuts will be gone...  all the items will be regular email.

It is up to you whether you then choose to 'delete' the archived items or not, during the export.

Can this be done to the NEW Exchange whilst the migration is taking place, or does it have to be done the current Exchange?  I guess my question is, does EV directly integrate to the Exchange?  I just don't see how the Export Archive Wizard would know which of the two Exchanges to restore the mail to.

The export archive wizard can restore to a PST, or to the original mailbox. So it will be to the old environment.

So there are kind of two approaches:

* Export everything back to the original mailbox, then perform the migration, then re-archive using new environment, if required, or implement Exchange Personal Archives

* Export the archives to PST, delete all shortcuts, migrate the Exchange mailboxes, and then import all the PSTs into an Exchange personal archive.

Thanks for the multiple replies Rob.

Would this be a good plan of action:

Configure clients to not archive any more mail to EV
Export all to pst from the export archive wizard
Configure a policy to remove the shortcuts from each users mailbox
Migrate mailboxes to new Exchange
Import psts

?

Yep that's one way which would work.

However, I'm not sure if shortcut expiry will work, if you have previously disabled the user from EV archiving. You *could* change the existing archiving policy to be aged based and archive items over 999 years old.

Great stuff!  You're correct, it would be far easier to change the default policy.

I will configure the shortcut policy to remove anything over 1 day old AFTER I have exported all to psts and changed the default archiving policy.

Then comes the fun of manually importing them into the users mailbox one by one :-)