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John_F2011
Level 3
14 years ago
Solved

Shortcuts not in Outlook but in Archive Explorer

Hello

We're running EV 7.5 on Windows 2003 servers. Mail system is Exchange 2007 SP2 with Outlook 2007 SP2.

I notice that we have issues where users say they are missing archived items in their Outlook. When we ask them to check their Archive Explorer, they can see (and access) the items there. So it looks like the shortcuts have somehow been removed or misplaced - is this common? Does anyone know how this can happen?

Secondly, is there a way to recreate the shortcuts in Outlook again? I know we can right click on items in EV > Copy to Mailbox, but this seems to restore the entire item (i.e unarchives it) rather than just the shortcut? Which means the user then has to re-archive again, choosing whichever retention policy they need?

Finally, when viewing an archived item in Outlook, is there anyway to find out the retention policy that item has been archived under? For example, a user has an archived item and wants ot know how long that item will remain in the vault for before it's expired, how can they do that?

Can anyone help?

  • I notice that we have issues where users say they are missing archived items in their Outlook. When we ask them to check their Archive Explorer, they can see (and access) the items there. So it looks like the shortcuts have somehow been removed or misplaced - is this common? Does anyone know how this can happen?


    It can be either from something such as Exchange Mailbox Manager just cleaning out old items (For instance mine is set to delete items older than 60 days, which encourages me to delete what i don't want, archive what I do want. Keeps the mailbox smaller and under quota)

    It can be from Shortcut Expiry, in your Archiving Policy for the user, you will have a tab for shortcut expiry, which basically says if a shortcut is older than X amount of days, delete it.

    And it can be that users are moving items and forgetting they've moved it, or it can be that they've deleted it and not known they've deleted it.  It happens all the time
     

    Secondly, is there a way to recreate the shortcuts in Outlook again? I know we can right click on items in EV > Copy to Mailbox, but this seems to restore the entire item (i.e unarchives it) rather than just the shortcut? Which means the user then has to re-archive again, choosing whichever retention policy they need?

    So first of all, you cannot create shortcuts out of thin air, the item needs to exist for Enterprise Vault to modify. So yes you would have to restore the item. However in Archive Explorer there are two options

    1. Move To Mailbox
    2. Copy To Mailbox

    A Copy To Mailbox restores the item, but it still exists in the users archive
    A Move To Mailbox restores the item, but it deletes the original item from the users archive.

    The user could manually rearchive it again, or they can just let EV automatically archive it after 60 days or whatever your policy is set to.

    Finally, when viewing an archived item in Outlook, is there anyway to find out the retention policy that item has been archived under? For example, a user has an archived item and wants ot know how long that item will remain in the vault for before it's expired, how can they do that?


    If you have the full outlook client installed (DCOM Client), you should be able to go to the options of the message (i.e select the message and hit Alt-Enter), you should then have an Enterprise Vault tab that i believe tells you the Retention Category name and when it was archived

  • I notice that we have issues where users say they are missing archived items in their Outlook. When we ask them to check their Archive Explorer, they can see (and access) the items there. So it looks like the shortcuts have somehow been removed or misplaced - is this common? Does anyone know how this can happen?


    It can be either from something such as Exchange Mailbox Manager just cleaning out old items (For instance mine is set to delete items older than 60 days, which encourages me to delete what i don't want, archive what I do want. Keeps the mailbox smaller and under quota)

    It can be from Shortcut Expiry, in your Archiving Policy for the user, you will have a tab for shortcut expiry, which basically says if a shortcut is older than X amount of days, delete it.

    And it can be that users are moving items and forgetting they've moved it, or it can be that they've deleted it and not known they've deleted it.  It happens all the time
     

    Secondly, is there a way to recreate the shortcuts in Outlook again? I know we can right click on items in EV > Copy to Mailbox, but this seems to restore the entire item (i.e unarchives it) rather than just the shortcut? Which means the user then has to re-archive again, choosing whichever retention policy they need?

    So first of all, you cannot create shortcuts out of thin air, the item needs to exist for Enterprise Vault to modify. So yes you would have to restore the item. However in Archive Explorer there are two options

    1. Move To Mailbox
    2. Copy To Mailbox

    A Copy To Mailbox restores the item, but it still exists in the users archive
    A Move To Mailbox restores the item, but it deletes the original item from the users archive.

    The user could manually rearchive it again, or they can just let EV automatically archive it after 60 days or whatever your policy is set to.

    Finally, when viewing an archived item in Outlook, is there anyway to find out the retention policy that item has been archived under? For example, a user has an archived item and wants ot know how long that item will remain in the vault for before it's expired, how can they do that?


    If you have the full outlook client installed (DCOM Client), you should be able to go to the options of the message (i.e select the message and hit Alt-Enter), you should then have an Enterprise Vault tab that i believe tells you the Retention Category name and when it was archived

  • The major problem you have is that people can move shortcuts around after they have been created.  Modified metadata in EV 8, tied with Shortcut Processing aims to address that.  That might be part of the problem.

    A bigger part though relates to the answer to the questions :-

     

    a/ Is your policy configured to create shortcuts?

    b/ Do you expire your shortcuts after a period of time?

    c/ The shortcuts that users say are missing...  are they for "old" or "new" items?  [If old, then it could be related to b]

     

    There is a registry key which will recreate shortcuts.  However that key should only be used under guidance from Support - and it recreates the shortcut body (not sure if it recreates the whole shortcut without testing it, or looking it up).

     

    Finally .. no.  Not directly.  They could performa a search, and see the retention category, the Outlook shortcut only contains the retention category id.  For that issue I'd suggest raising it in the Ideas section of this forum, if it is not already there.

  • RestoreShortcutBody will only fix existing shortcuts, it won't recreate shortcuts that don't exist unfortunately

  • Thanks all... we don't have Shortcut Expiry, and we can normally see shortcuts for items OLDER than the ones missing, so I guess it's the users moving shortcuts around.

    Regarding this point:

    "Secondly, is there a way to recreate the shortcuts in Outlook again? I know we can right click on items in EV > Copy to Mailbox, but this seems to restore the entire item (i.e unarchives it) rather than just the shortcut? Which means the user then has to re-archive again, choosing whichever retention policy they need?"

    So, to clarify the situation...

    - User think archived item has been expired so we check Archive Explorer via IE and can see the 'missing' items there, even though the shortcut has been removed in Outlook somehow. We have multiple Retention Policies that users can choose when they archive items, so just want to restore the missing shortcut to Outlook that points to the archived item. But, selecting Copy to Mailbox seems to actually restore the entire item (unarchived) in their mailbox, which means that the item has to be re-archived again.

    Since the item must exist in the Vault for it to appear in Archive Explorer, is there no way just to recreate the shortcut in Outlook pointing to that item? Why does the Copy to Mailbox function RESTORE the actual item to the mailbox (leaving the archived item in EV as well) rather than just restore the shortcut?

  • When you do a copy to mailbox in Archive Explorer it does not delete the item from the archive, it will remain in the archive until the user deletes or or Storage Expiry removes it for them.

    If they are using Move To Mailbox in Archive Explorer then it will restore it to the mailbox AND delete the item from the archive, to get it back in to the archive either the user will have to manually re-archive it or let EV rearchive it

    Enterprise Vault does not have any functionality to restore the shortcut only.

  • Thanks...

    So if I Copy to Mailbox, then the original item is restored to Exchange/Outlook, correct, but the item in the Vault is not deleted.

    What happens if I then re-archive that restored item? Will there not be two items in the Vault for the same email? And what happens if I re-archive with a different retention policy than it was first archived with?

  • When the item is restored to the mailbox it actually has several hidden properties on the message, such as Restore date, archive id, transaction ID etc, it reads those properties and determines its already been archived so simply just changes it from an email to a shortcut (it won't attempt to store the item again etc)

    If you change the retention category, thats a good question, i believe in theory what should happen is it will update the existing item with the new retention category

  • Ah, so you're saying that when Copy to Mailbox is used, the item originally appears as an unarchived mail, but EV will re-archive it again automatically with the same retention details it had?