Archive Shortcut Deletion

[cmew]

Hi guys,

I have a user that has taken it upon themselves to uninstall the EV Client within Outlook.  The reason being is that they didn't want to archive any more items as they are moving from EV to Exchange Native Archiving.

My question here is, is there anyway that I can clean up the shortcuts that have been left behind, using EV or is this a manual job?

My second question for moving forward for other users, is that my assumption would be to Disable the mailbox for Archiving and remove all shortcuts older than 1 day? Would anybody agree here or would there be a better way to do this?

[Rob_Wilcox1 · Accepted solution]

I would point out that just removing the EV Outlook Add-in will not stop archiving.

Sure it will stop the user MANUALLY ARCHIVING, but then not clicking the Store in Vault button will do the same thing :)

Background/scheduled archiving will still take place using whatever policy is applicable to this user.

... until you disable them from archiving as you said.

Then yes, shortcut deletion is the way forward.. but remember if you change the policy, and synchronise mailboxes 'all' people targeted by the same policy will also be impacted.

A better approach might be to export their archive back to their mailbox .. or export it to PST and then simply create an Outlook Search Folder with all shortcuts in (you can do it based on message class) and delete them.

[cmew]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the quick reply and thanks for helping me make a bit of sense of the situation.

Could I clarify one more thing? If I disable the mailbox from Archiving, would the shortcut deletion still work after this?

I think the plan for all users moving forward is as follows:

1. Export the Vault Items to PST (for import to an Exchange Archive)
2. Disable Archiving for Mailboxes
3. Run the Shortcut Deletion tasks to remove from the original mailboxes.

Does that seem feasible?

Thanks

Craig

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Sorry I don't know the answer off hand about the shortcut delete option.  I've also not got an environment that I can test it on at the moment.

[Jean-Louis_Vand]

Hi,

Effectively, if you disable the user it won't be part of the archive task running in the background.

What you should do if you want to remove the shorcuts (but don't recall the objects) would be to define a new Mail archiving policy with the following rules:

- Archive items based on age: older than 99 years (I doubt that EV will find such e-mails)

- Remove Shortcut when shortcut are older than 1 day (I'm not sure 1 day is the minimum, maybe you will have to set that to 1 week).

Define a new provisionning group linked to this new policy and bind this PG to the users you want to cleanup.

Let the archiving task run for a while (check the reporting) untill all the shortcuts have been removed from the mailbox.

After that, you can plan the disable user process, even maybe with a zap mailbox (EVPM) to completely remove any EV references.

Of course, there is still all the data located in the achive which is still need to be exported... But this is another story :)

Regards,

[Prone2Typos]

This can also be done via native Exchange management, EWS script (per mailbox), Powershell (per mailbox)      a number of other ways. If they are still enabled in EV ... it can be the easiest.

If these answers addressed your concerns please flag the posting as resolved to ensure help is getting where it is most needed.

Many thanks and hope this helped.