How to Remote a User from Enterprise Vault (EV) mailbox Archiving
Outlook for Windows
I have had quite a few people ask to be removed from EV archiving for some reason or another. I recently had to spend a lot of time doing it and wanted to share with some people in hopes of making their job a little easier. It is a multi step process that must be carried out in order and will require the users interaction.
Situation: A user in your environment needs to be removed from mailbox archiving and wants their Outlook to be like it was before EV was implented.
The Fix:
- Export the users Archive to PST just in case something goes wrong.
- Use the export to PST option in Export Archive wizard. Basically, make a backup!
- Use the 'Export Archives to their original mailboxes'
- This will create duplicate items. The original message and the stub will exist. This action can re-create folders the user has deleted and will restore items to the original location when it was archived. You must make sure the mailbox in Exchange has enough room for growth as the mailbox will grow when you export the items from the mailbox back to the archive.
- http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH35614
- NOTE: This will also disable the users archive in EV.
- http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH50905
- This is the only way to do this.
- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/find-messages-or-items-with-a-search-folder-HA0103549...
- See below for details on making the search folder.
- Use EVPM to Zap the EV properties from the user’s mailbox in Exchange.
- If EVPM wasn’t enough, remove the Hidden messages from the mailbox locally to clean up the Outlook mail client. (Optional, but I would do it to be through)
- EV might not delete the archive immediately. The server may be busy or waiting for another task to complete. Just follow up the next day.
- Create an Outlook search folder to locate all the mail stubs and delete them.
- Remove the user from the AD group that made them part of EV.
- Uninstall the Outlook plugin/add-on from the user’s mail client.
- Delete the user from EV.
Optional: Skip step two and just delete the archive. Do the rest of the steps and give the user the PST you created in Step 1. Or you could open the PST data file in Outlook and drag the messages back into a folder on the OST (Users exchange mailbox). This will merge the PST archive back onto the Exchange database for that user (aka…their mailbox).
Search Folder:
Right Click “Search Folders” in the Navigation pane of Outlook. Choose “New Search Folder”. Give the search folder a name and choose the “Criteria”, then choose Advanced. The Field should be “Message Class” contains, Value= EnterpriseVault. Save your folder.
This will find all the EV mail stubs in the users mailbox so you can delete them.
On further review, I did write this post in a little haste. You are correct. Step 5 doens't need to happen as you pointed out. I was refering to deleting the archive from EV, not the user.This had already happened in another step. Thank you for catching that.
I wanted to take this opportunity to add a few things as well:
- As it pertains to shortcut deletion, I had mentioned that the only option was to manaully remove the shortcuts from the user mailbox. This isn't 100% true. You could ahead of the process make the user part of a different mailbox policy that would delete all shortcuts.This is on the ShortCut Deletion tab of the mailbox policy you create. Give it a few days and confirm all the shortcuts are gone before you do the archive export back to the users mailbox.
- It is also important to note that if you are using DA (Discovery Accelerator) and the user has items that are on legal hold you will not be able to fully remove the archive until all items are off legal hold. The system will remove all items from the archive that are not on legal hold, but cannot fully remove the archive until all items are free of the hold.
