Using Virtual Vault with Cached mode Disabled

[MWallen]

Hello,

I have working with a customer that was interested in leveraging the use of Virtual vault for thier existing EV 9 enviornment. 

They have a hard requirement that there is no email data residing on the endpoints, which is why I was playing around with setting up VV with cached mode disabled.

After setting it up I enabled two of the customers admins with the newly created policy.  It is working well and they are really happy with how it will ease the end users experience while migrating PST files into the vault.

A major concern  for the customer was brought to my attention today.  One of the admins was checking out the MDC file and noticed it grew when moving messages to VV.  So he decided to rename this file to .PST and he said he could then open it up.  Now I have yet to try this myself to confirm, but if this is the case then I dont think VV will be able to be used for this customer. 

When configuring it I did select "Offline store required" set to NO.

And I set "Content Strategy to: Do not store any items in Cache in the vault cache tab.

My assumption was that this would not allow any cached data to be copied to the laptops, but the customer is saying otherwise.

I have been reading though the best practices guides and anything else I can locate online to try and get additional info on exactly how VV works and what requirements it needs locally on the clients.

I have opened up a case and waiting on a response in the mean time.

So basically, I would like to know if there is any way to configure EV to enable users to see a VV folder in outlook to gain the look and feel of the vault as a PST file without allowing any cached data to actually reside on the clients (for security reasons this is not allowed at this site), or do I need to abandon the idea of enableing VV for this company?

Thanks

Michael 

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Virtual Vault is an extension of Vault Cache, and thus cannot exist without Vault Cache being enabled.
The way Virtual vault works and allows items to be uploaded is that it gets added to Vault Cache and then uploaded.

There are basically two pieces to Vault Cache
The Metadata Cache and the Content Cache files.

The Metadata Cache is the MDC file which as you say is a PST File, this is the file that is opened and represented within Outlook and contains the folder structure and basic information about the messages contained with in.

The Content Cache are the DB Files which are also PST files, when an item is opened from Virtual Vault it finds out which DB file the item exists in and then opens the item from that DB File.

If the users cannot have this occuring then they have no other choice but to use AE (Which won't be available offline), the virtual vault behaviors you are seeing are by design



 

[MWallen]

Thanks for the response.

In reading the best practices for more information I noticed that I originally configured the EV server as follows:

Show contents in reading pane set to default(always show content)

I read up on the setting change to (never show content)  this setting states that it will only show the items header cache and a banner that provides a link to open the item from the server.

Not sure if this would make any difference, and I assume it would not.  But it might limit the actual data being stored on the local system?  

Just wondering if this would limit the data stored locally on the laptops to just header and a link.  If so, I can check to see if the customer is able to allow this partial data.  Since attachments and message body might not be stored locally I might be able to get away with this, assuming I am reading this correctly.

Otherwise I will let the customer know that VV is not going to work for thier environement.

Thanks

[Rob_Wilcox1]

You can make Vitual Vault read only which means that items can't be dragged and dropped in to it...  you always need an MDC file though :(