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Turls
Level 6
Sometimes support boils down to pure numbers. Version numbers, that is. Recently a large county government customer contacted Symantec Business Critical Support (BCS) with an Enterprise Vault issue. Brian, the Business Critical Account Manager (BCAM) noted that the customer’s EV Discovery Accelerator (DA) was no longer working. Ken, an EV technical support expert, picked up the ticket within ten minutes and contacted the customer.

“I called Eric [the customer] and set up a WebEx session immediately.” Recalls Ken. “He told me that after an upgrade to Discovery Accelerator 8.0, the program no longer worked. “One of the first things Support needs to know in this kind of case is what are the previous and current versions of the software?” Ken found that the customer had upgraded from Version 2007 Service Pack 1 to Version 8.0 Base – an upgrade path which is not supported and does not work.

Upgrade confusion
Ken knew from his support experience that the upgrade would only be successful from a Version 7.0 SP5 or 2007 SP4 installation. Ken also discovered that the customer didn’t need the data from the original DA customer database, so the customer opted for a new installation of DA 8 as the cleanest solution. First, Ken guided the customer through completely removing DA from the server. The initial steps to install a fresh copy of DA 8 encountered some configuration issues. Some issues regarding prerequisites to installing DA on a clustered server caused a few setbacks, but Ken quickly isolated the cause of those issues as well and corrected them by confirming proper installation of the prerequisites and correcting the server registry entries. Among other tweaks to the installation, Ken walked Eric through entering the correct path for his SQL/database files and creating a fresh EVBADiscovery customer. “He was a fairly savvy user,” Ken says. “He was able to do exactly what I needed him to do.”

Another snag occurred when the customer attempted to log into the DA Client from his workstation using his own logon. “He hadn’t given his logon Admin rights,” Ken said, “So we installed the DA Client on the DA server and launched it as the Vault Service Account.” Once the DA Client was accessing the new DA Customer database, Ken guided the customer though creating a new ‘SuperAdmin’ account and assigning it to the customer’s logon. After that, it was pretty much smooth sailing. Ken checked the archives to make sure they were all listed and explained to Eric how to customize each case if all user and journal archives don’t need to be searched. Next, they walked through enabling the oldest and youngest search date optimization and restarted the system. “At that point he could add cases, searches, and everything was running great,” remembers Ken. “Eric was very happy with the resolution,” says Ken. “And we were lucky that he did not need the DA databases.” The entire process—complicated as it was—only took about ninety minutes.

Product changes and continuing education
Ken is a great believer in continuing education for support customers, so he provided Eric with additional Technical Notes and also pointed him to the correct sections in the Installing and Configuring Guide and the DA Reviewer’s Guide on his server. “The better educated they are, the easier support becomes,” says Ken. “It’s a policy we firmly believe in.”

Brian, the BCAM on the incident wrote in an email:

“The customer was extremely happy with Ken and the case was resolved on first contact. There’s not much else to say but….. Thanks Ken!!”

As an added benefit, engineering will introduce new code in the upcoming DA service pack that alerts customers when they attempt an upgrade using an incompatible version. In the meantime, Ken knows exactly how to respond.
Version history
Last update:
‎05-07-2009 10:00 PM
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