How could we make the admin console more user friendly?

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Hi,

I thought it might be good to start a discussion on how the administration could be improved.  What ways could it be improved to do your day to day tasks.?

So some ideas from me.

1. Improving the ability to find an archive
2. Making it easier to see what version and service pack level each server is.

So what are yours?  Perhaps some things around PST?  Perhaps around FSA?

Would love to hear your thoughts. 

Mike

[John_Chisari]

 What about telling the user if EV is in Backup Mode like we do for license checking. :)

[dfwood]

As we use FSA it would be useful to have an overview of all the volumes and the polices associated to them. Would be much easier than having to right click and check the properties of each on individually

[Paterson]

Hi,
I just started using EV 8 and I find having products that I don't use, ie. Sharepoint and Domino as extra things that clutter up the admin console.

-Scott

[DrDave]

More options in the Export mail wizard. e.g. time based but only this folder and sub-folders. It is a pain having to export ALL from a folder then push back what you didn't want.

[Wayne_Humphrey]

and an auto refresh? *g* i hate refreshing, darn the rest

[Liam_Finn1]

Many of us use EV for compliance and setting number of days and years does not work for us.

We run expiry once a year and we specify to retain data after a specific date so anything before Jan 1 2002 as an example

Right now we need to calculate the number of days between present and Jan 1 2002, then we need to kick off the expiry at 30 seconds to midnight to ensure that we dont retian data from December 31 2001

In the storage expiry screens add the ability to specify expire items older than a date and time





 

[Paul_Grimshaw]

Unhide the Find Archive or Folder feature as it is a pain asking the customer over a webex to hold down ctrl and shift so that I can then right click and make the option appear. I see no valid reason why this is hidden but maybe there is Mike.

When a user rebuilds an index have more of a Really do you want to do this question and maybe a message to contact Sym support before they do this unless that fully understand the potential ramifications. I know this has been harped on about before.

Have Licence information maybe as an option off the help menu.

Might be out of scope of user friendly but have the ability to right click on an exchange server and install the OWA extensions as we do for FSA Agent.

Could on the properties of the exchange server or somewhere else get a quick snapshot of exchange versions and hotfixes installed.

Same for file server on the version tab. Could we add in the File server O/S version

[jprknight-oldax]

Building blocks fail-over...

We use building blocks failover in our organisation; I would like to see something more intuative stating a service is running on a standby server than hosted listed as the service status.

Export Users....

We are now at the mark where the user mailboxes are split in two. So we now need to click on each container, export the contents from that container, repeat for (at the moment) both containers, and then copy and paste the two files into one.

Restart Admin service...

It would be nice to be able to restart the admin service on a given server within the console, rather than having to a particular machine or connect through mmc.
 

[Chuck_Ford]

I agree with having the ability to hide unused features.

[PhilCo_2]

1.how about giving us the ability to 'run now' against a specific public folder and archive all contents?

2. Provide the ability to manually add user permissions to indevidual public folders, otherwise, if a PF has been deleted from the PF server, how else could we ever give access to new users to the historic data?

[PhilCo_2]

1. How about giving us the possibilty to highlight multiple archives and change default settings, such as Indexing levels, rebuild indexes, take offline etc. This would be particularly handy for our thousands of obsolete mailboxes that are never accessed any more, but still have huge indexes, we have about 4TB of index data, probably 50% of this is for obsolete mailbox archives that are unlikely to ever be searched again, we need a way of cleaning this up and going through archive by archive is painful. If we had a way to highlight maybe 50 archives at a time, set them to minimum index levels and kick off a rebuild, that would really help us out and claw back a lot of index space

[EVNoodles]

It would nice to see a percentage progress bar on PST's that are currently being migrated in the Personal Store Management Section - Files Section either inside the entries or as a column in the Files Section

[EVNoodles]

If possible allow Mailbox Archiving to take advantage of the Adjust Exchange Quotas function that PST migration uses.

i.e. If a mailbox is over it's limit then rather than having the rectify the problem as an admin later the task can plough through mailbox and adjust the quota and then notify of the change via Event Viewer or Reporting.

This might also require an additional setting for Archiving Policy of how much overhead could be added to the mailbox  where x = number of seats y = amount added to each mailbox if required to allow archiving to suceed.

[jprknight-oldax]

As an EV admin I find I need to add myself to the permissions list of individual archives within the admin console. After a while I find archive explorer has a long list of archives I have given myself permissions to. It would be really good if there was a button to remove those permissions from my admin account in one click, rather that having to open up each of those archive permissions and remove myself.

I also find that once a user has been removed from AD, and I have tried to remove myself from the permission list I cannot because I am told there must be a  valid user in the list which there is no longer, only the SID remains for the deleted AD account.

I hope this makes sense, :)

Jeremy.

[Joseph_Rodgers]

Every option should have the choice for a manual entry.  In enterprise network browse is often not a practical option.

Simplfication of design.  The getting started wizard (imho) is of very little use because it is too simple but removing some of the layers of complexity or making them advanced hidden options would greatly reduce the admin learning curve.

ability to create missing components whenever required.  eg:  Manually creating a target journal mailbox without having created a journal archive, or vault store should call the appropriate wizard.

more inline statistics.  eg: when selecting mailbox archive in left pane show archive with more info like # of items, size, audit data if available, etc.

a welcome screen that says "Don't Panic" when the console is first opened... ;)

-Joe

[MichelZ]

I vote for the Don't Panic screen... :)

And the answer is 42! Of course.

[andrew_wolf]

Not specifically Console related but definitely admin related - having more tasks available to PowerShell and scripting generally would be really handy

An example would be that our termination procedures requires the archiving of all email. While we move the account into the appropriate OU (and target the OU with a policy), EV will still only archive a certain number of items per night. If we could script a "Archive all items now" for the user we could shorten the time that termination takes without having to do all sorts of manual tasks (Run provisioning task, Run sync task, Run archive task etc)

[MichelZ]

Do you need any more info here?
Please mark a post as a solution if it fits your needs.

Cheers