What can we do in Enterprise Vault to DELIGHT you?

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Hi,

The Enterprise Vault team is always looking to improve our products based upon customer feedback.  Some changes you want would be new features, some times it's just improvments in an existing feature etc.

So I have a question for you.  What changes should we make which would not just please you but actually delight you about Enterprise Vault (apart from an ability to print money :-)?. The kind of feature that excites you, puts a smile on your face and you say I can't wait to use that, it's going to help us so much...  One example for me is Virtual Vault in V8 sp3.

We have the ideas system on Symantec Connect but a lot of them seem focused on improvements to existing features (which isn't a bad thing!) and I'm just wondering what else there is out there...  At the moment if I looked at that list, there are probably 4 suggestions that have 10 or more votes.  I'm sure it would take more than those 4 product changes to make every customer delighted to use our product!

So some examples I can think of based upon discussions/issues on this forum

Improved monitoring/reporting.
Perhaps videos on how's to etc,
Perhaps best practise document
Easier OWA setup

Very interested to hear your feedback!

Cheers,
Mike Bilsborough
Director, Enterprise Vault Engineering





 

[Andy_Wragg_-_BT]

The level of control on partition rollover is based around allocating a (NTFS) single volume per partition, or an age based policy. Whats the point of that? Couldnt we have the abilty to limit the partition to a predetermined sized (like XGB) and then rollover.? We can then size the partitions based loosly on the amount of time it takes to back up (or recover) the partition using the backup solution at hand, and not the age of the partition or the size of storage container that holds the partition. 
This would keep partitions to a managable size for backup and recovery purposes.

Cheers
Andy

[Andy_Wragg_-_BT]

When will EV (and all its reports) support x64 Windows/SQL? Considering that EV is a resource constrained application, surely running it on a 64 bit platform would boost performance. Also 64bit hardware is now standard on most industry standard server hardware, it seems daft to me to have to downgrade the platform to i386 just to support an application. 

[Liam_Finn1]

EV is already supported on a 64Bit platform in WOW mode. EV is still 32bit but it is fully supported on 64Bit OS

[Andy_Wragg_-_BT]

Would be nice to be FULLY 64bit though, wouldn't you agree? the 3 most usefull reports arent available on 64bit SSRS either. 

[Biohazzard]

So basically, Even though you CAN install it on 64 bit... there is no performance increase to the application.

[Biohazzard]

So basically, Even though you CAN install it on 64 bit... there is no performance increase to the application.

[Simon_Butler]

Some ideas....

Improved index architecture - Altavista works, but it is slow with DA granular searching over a large data set.
Single Admin console - merge EVBAADMIN, Custodian Manager, CA, EV – too many consoles, all  with different look & feel.
Hierarchical policies rather than flat provisioning – Many different options now that can lead to provisioning groups growing exponentially in number.
Change of architecture – move away from 1 EV per MBX server(s) – distributed processing with redundancy and automated failover (not simple clustering)
Improve Enterprise architecture – Directory implications are leading to designs with multiple dispersed directories
Better security controls in DA – cannot restrict ability of Case administrators to certain Archives at present.   Requires Ethical Wall options.
Improved analysers & best practice – input (automatically collect) organisational metrics and propose settings.
Input into Exchange journal settings – automated application of settings based on policy, automated switching.
Move away from mailboxes as collection points for journal messages – not best for larger organisations as it leads to extra traffic & duplication of records.  Provide an SMTP destination & de-duplicate at source.
Monitoring & reporting – We constantly have to write new scripts to monitor EV and DA & to automatically fix ‘unfixable’ issues – integrate into SCOM - EV is a mile behind other apps in this area.
Allow journaling based on message sent date not modified date (specifically for non-email journaling, e.g. bulk submissions of Bloomberg, faxing, IM by email via mailbox)

x64 is a must for the next version
Simpler service packs
MSI install
Some best practice / recommended config for Virtual Vault….

 

[MichelZ]

Simon

Some good suggestions here, thanks.
Can you also add them to the "Ideas" section of connect, that we can comment them and vote on them?

Thanks & Cheers
Michel

[Simon_Butler]

...I can always ask the account manager to do it :)

Add to the list:

Auditing in EV in DA (The existing EV audit is not very useful - looks like development was halted in 1999).  Need to know who is reviewing what in DA and when they reviewed it.  (Down to individual items)

& after my last weekends work - Symantec releasing info on all known bugs rather than advising mid-way through a DA upgrade...

[Simon_Butler]

Performance decrease as I understand it.  (For EV anyway - DA seems better on x64 - perhaps just the OS making up for the app)

DA 8 still doesn't seem to use multiple processors well...certain proecsses are still maxing out single cores whilst the rest are fairly quiet.

[worldzfree]

Example scenario would be a Vault implementation that started at 6.0 and has been upgraded over time to 2007.  Symant-Itas-KVS figured out over time that some initial implementation methodology was flawed like not rolling over the index volumes.  They would fix that with newer versions of Vault but there was no system in-place to go back and fix the already existing (i.e. massive) index volumes.  Adopting a system to upgrade "everything" to the latest "improvements" would make sense.

[Liam_Finn1]

There is a way to fix the existing...make the necessary settings in the registry and rebuild the indexes

Another option which will be coming in EV8 SP3 will be the option to move a vault from one vault store to another. This move will happen online so the old vault wont be offline while the move is happening so the indexes will still be searchable. Once you move the vault it will rebuild new indexes in the smaller format (if the settings on that server are correct) therefore fixing the issue you mentioned about the large indexes.

As an FYI. I just completed the rebuilding of all my indexes. it took me over a month to do them to the new smaller index format (type 3) running 24 *7 but it is done and it is much better now

[MichelZ]

i dont think that thw index will rebuild when you move the archive. and thats all prliminary info anyway :)

[Liam_Finn1]

Check out the IDEAS section about the request I submitted to do on-line rebuilds https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/idea/rebuild-indexes-online-without-taking-present-index-off... In this Glenn clearly says that the index will be rebuilt as part of the move feature that is planned for EV8 SP3 which is scheduled to be released within the next month or two

[MichelZ]

Thanks for the info Liam!
Tought that at least they leave the index intact when moving from/to the same version.
This is a big overhead that will impact performance...

Would be great if we could disable that :)

[Liam_Finn1]

I dont think they can disable that becuase i believe (and i may be wrong and it would not be the first time) that there is some info in the indexes linking back to the vault \ vault store

[GregRountree]

1. Delete calendar items that do not re-occur
2. Search for vaults in the admin console (large companies have several thousand vaults they need to find)
3. EVPM script to create folders does not allow you to move, copy, or rename.
4. 64 bit and allow Indexing to take up more than 4gb. :)
5. How about a Dashboard? If you have 10 or more journal mailboxes you cannot monitor them well with the current tool set.
6. Restrict the users ablility to move archived items out of an EVPM folder.
7. Monitoring for Journal Threasholds instead of using the Perfmon for EV!
8. Active Directory integration when deleting users - Same with CA and DA!
9. Remove the client from CA and DA and go back to the web page.
10. Don't use SQL indexing for Search within a Search
11. Multiple filters for CA databases.

That should keep you busy for a while :)

Love,

-G

[dfwood]

A couple of things to the ArchiveExplorerUI would be good.

Previews for image files
Alternative restore location for files

Dan

[matt_niswonger]

1.) Client driven PST migrations leave a lot to be desired.

• EV assumes the file is intact and free of corruption before starting the migration, and I've had countless PST files bomb as a result.
• Client driven migrations should not default to "status 900" and instead should default all PST files to "status 100" and wait for intervention from the admin to mark which PST they want to import.  (e.g. I don't want to import SharePoint PST files and I can't always do SQL queries fast enough to set the status to 100 before the client starts uploading).
• I have to leave my migration task set to manual and stopped before I enable clients for migration and then run queries to set them all to "status 100".  That also means that for those that are uploading PST files I don't want, I have to have them restart Outlook, sometimes more than once.  If I can't get in touch with the end user, my logs fill up with "Event ID 8567, Referece: HasPstChunkMigrated".

2.) I would like a way to EASILY bulk delete shortcuts and archived content, but only if the user has permissions to do so.  Or, if the feature could be added to Archive Explorer to allow archived content to be deleted in bulk and then allow the Exchange Policy to delete orphaned shortcuts that would work too.  But I would want a way to assign permissions for people (e.g. power users, admins, etc) to do this so not anyone would be able to.

3.) It would also be nice (and I know this was already mentioned) to rebuild shortcuts for archived content.

Thanks.

[AndrewB]

I would like to see an EV-aware NetBackup client. I think that EV is a large enough product and that there are enough customers out there using NetBackup that this would be worth developing.