Going Behind the Scenes to Archive Incoming Emails

[Turls]

A large communications firm was investigating an employee and wanted to be able to capture his incoming emails without alerting him that his communications were being monitored. Their HR manager contacted Symantec to find out if such monitoring could be done through Enterprise Vault. "He had gotten a top-level directive to export or archive this person's email and he didn't know how to go about it," says Neil, the Symantec tech support engineer who took the call. "The process he was planning to use was to export the mail as a PST file and then archive that file. He could have done that, but it's a lengthy process and it wouldn't be the best solution if management wanted to be able to recall those messages quickly."

While talking to the customer, Neil learned that the company wanted to be able to capture all the emails the employee was getting and archive them in real time, so that at any given moment they would be able to look through all the messages he had gotten up to that point. Because it was an HR issue, they wanted to be sure the employee wouldn't know that his emails were being archived or that he was being monitored.

Setting policies to capture and access archived messages

Neil told the customer that there was a better solution than PST files for archiving messages behind the scenes. "With Enterprise Vault, you can create a provisioning group and policy to archive messages as soon as they arrive in a user's inbox," Neil says." The user would get the email but he wouldn't know it was being archived."

Organizations typically use this approach when employees leave the company. All they have to do is create a provisioning group for all users who have left the company. Then when an employee leaves, their login is added to that group and the Enterprise Vault administrator creates a separate policy from within the Enterprise Vault administration console. "Everything is all set up in the policy," Neil explains. "You apply that policy to the provisioning group , you synchronize with the users in that group, the policy is picked up by those users, and then all the email in the mailbox is archived. HR can then go ahead and disable them from Active Directory because they've gotten all of their email. That's the process I suggested to the customer in this case." With Neil's assistance, the administrator assigned the appropriate permissions to the archive and the customer had access to the archived emails.

The entire support case was resolved remotely via WebEx in a couple of hours. "The solution wasn't critical to the customer form an IT perspective, but it was critical from an HR perspective," Neil says. "I was able to show him a different way Enterprise Vault could help, and he understood more about the versatility of the program after I showed him how to configure the provisioning group. There are so many components and often people don't understand the different components and how they can help them in their work. He was very appreciative."