User confusion: vault toolbar buttons in Outlook 2003 don't work in Archive Explorer

[Dutchman01]

Archive explorer is opened within Outlook 2003.
To several users it is not clear that buttons in the outlook vault toolbars (like "remove from vault") don't work in Archive Explorer (see screenshot). From a user perspective, buttons that are visible are buttons that should work.

My question: is there any way to make the buttons in Outlook work with Archive Explorer or hide them while Archive Explorer is open?

Enterprise Vault 2007 (7.5.3.2138.0)

[Rob_Wilcox1 · Accepted solution]

You could launch Archive Explorer in it's own browser window -- but then it's not very "integrated".

Other than that, I think it's user education.

[Dutchman01]

Rob, thank you very much for your answer.
Based on your answer, apparently this works as designed. The design however is hard to understand for regular users. They don't notice that it's actually Internet Explorer running within Outlook and therefore expect every clickable button to work. We'll consider whether to run archive explorer separately or to accept that we need to answer this question from users.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

I agree it could be better, in fact for belt-and-braces you should perhaps log it on this site, under the IDEAS section.