Symantec Enterprise Vault™ Enterprise-Scale Administration

[Turls]

Introduction to Enterprise-Scale Administration

Over the past few years, archiving has quickly moved beyond its role as the pet project of the Microsoft® Exchange administrator for reducing Exchange storage. It has fast become an integral part of the information lifecycle strategy of companies, allowing them to define where enterprise data is stored and for how long. With access to electronic data expanding beyond IT administrators to legal teams, human resources staff, and temporary project teams, archiving can actually be a corporate asset. And more and more archiving policies are being developed based on users’ roles, as awareness increases for the technical capabilities of applications like the Symantec Enterprise Vault framework.

Given this rise in the importance of archiving solutions, administrators are being tasked to:

• Easily tailor archiving policies for a workforce dealing with diverse end-user requirements.
  
  Granular policies can be assigned to a wide variety of users’ mailboxes and PST files, harnessing Active Directory® groups and queries, and automatically synchronized via the Enterprise Vault provisioning facility. Custom mailbox folder-level policies can further define custom retention periods as well as create immediate archiving rules for special uses such as a zero-day archive on a user’s Sent Items folder.


• Place more controls on how users’ information is managed and accessed, and reduce management costs by distributing administrative responsibilities across large IT teams.
  
  Enterprise Vault addresses the need to distribute administrative access and functions to many types of system administrators with its roles-based administration functionality, which delegates administrative authority by Active Directory users and/or groups.


• Provide informative reports about the status and trends in the archive.
  
  For those seeking insight into their archive system’s health and trends, the Enterprise Vault operations monitoring and reporting platform is a valuable resource.

All of these components are built into the core Enterprise Vault product, requiring no additional licensing and only minimal additional configuration.

This white paper reviews each of these Enterprise-Scale Administration features from Symantec, providing a basic understanding of how these solutions can be configured and utilized.

Granular policies and provisioning

Enterprise Vault offers granular policy management, so administrators can easily and automatically enable tailored mailbox archiving policies for both new and existing Exchange users. Enterprise Vault provisioning lets administrators identify users who require unique archiving settings—such as terminated employees or VIP individuals—and give them archiving and retention policies that are distinct from the majority of the user population. Users of Mac or laptop systems may need unique client settings, because of the capabilities of their mail client and the way it is used. The granular policies and provisioning features also make it possible to efficiently scale a large archiving implementation, dividing the user population evenly across multiple Enterprise Vault servers and storage devices.

Management of the granular policies, as with most Enterprise Vault functionality, is found within a central Administration Console, which is a convenient snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). From this central console, Enterprise Vault administrators can easily manage all Enterprise Vault policies and servers, including servers located at remote sites.

Archiving policies

Policies allow an administrator to control several different areas of a user’s mailbox environment, as well as how the user searches and accesses the archive from built-in Enterprise Vault applications.

There is a special Policies container in the Enterprise Vault Administration Console, with subcontainers for the various types of content that can be archived (see Figure 1). Although granular policies can be created and applied to many types of archiving sources, such as Lotus Domino®, Windows® file systems, and Microsoft SharePoint®, this white paper addresses Microsoft Exchange only.

To read the complete article, download the complete PDF.