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





 

[TonySterling]

you mean like this? 
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/318349.htm
Veritas NetBackup™ for Enterprise Vault™ Agent Administrator's Guide, version 6.5.4

[JMoser]

The fact that you have to open the EV server to the outside world to get Archive Explorer and Vault Search to work with Exchange 2007 OWA is KILLING us on Exchange migrations.  I can not sell every client ISA server or an F5 (even though I would like to).

This problem has also caused us numerous headaches when deploying Outlook Anywhere with Exchange 2007 for client that are using EV.

We have also received numerous complaints that the shortcuts in the preview pane no longer work in OWA because they do not contain an externally accessible FQDN and the extensions are no longer able to proxy these through based on the hostname.

I realize OWA is significantly different in Exchange 2007 than in 2003 but for that reason people are using it more heavily and rely on access to Enterprise Vault funcationality through it.

Jeff

[JayDhillon]

Would be nice nice to have exclusions feature when selecting any of the categories eg whole exchange organization, windows group or OU. This will allow us to exclude the system mailbox etc from archiving. Unless i am missing it.

[Vikes_2]

Hello,
One big issue that we are seeing is the inability to change the retention policy for archived FSA data. We have 60 file servers for around 13,000 users and we have a ton of requests to extend retention for data already archived with the standard company retention. Currently all we can do is delete the archive and adjust the policy then re-archive the data. But the big issue there is that we also use DA so what happens when we try to delete an archive that has legal hold data. We will have to leave the archive and create a duplicate to get the change. I hear that there is something like this in place for mailbox archiving but not yet for FSA, hopefully this functionality can be added for FSA.

Thanks
Travis

[Liam_Finn1]

 Why do that?

Why not just modify the retention category to the number of weeks, months or years that you need

[Rob_Wilcox1]

 @Andy

This has been discussed many times internally.  The issue is working out how much space a particular partition has taken up on a drive.  Here is an example, say you want to rollover your partition when the partition has reached (say) 450 Gb.  Currently we check once per minute for roll-over.   There is no Windows API for us to use to say "How big is that folder?".  You can try it out.. pick a nice partition, or folder anywhere on your environment, right click it go to properties, and wait 10-15 minutes for Windows to scan through the whole structure to work out the size and number of items.  That's what we're up against.  There is a nice API saying "How much free disk space is there"... but not for "How big is this folder"... and the enumeration of it, even in C++ (i.e. without a GUI) is massively expensive.

[DRHarrison]

Along with many of the items mentions, some little fixes that would help:

1. A way to sort and search provisioning group targets to quickly find a target I need to remove, say for processing terminations.
2. The same request for any mailbox/user lists similar to the Find function in the Exchange 2007 gui.

[Vikes_2]

Hey Liam,
We have a standard archive retention of 2years. So most items were archived with this retention, now that we have requests to change the retention of items that have been archived with the standard retention we cannot change the period of time on the standard retention as the majority of the items archived will need to keep the original 2 year retention. I had suggested using retention folders but it was rejected by management.

Travis

[PhilCo_2]

As mentioned at the customer forum earlier this week, we're really struggling with Public Folder archiving, largely due to core functionality not being available, such as;

- Cannot synchronise permissions for a specific public folder, in fact, there is no 'synchronise permissions' even available for the Public Folder hierarchy at all. All we can do is do an archive run against our whole PF tree and 'hope' the modified permission is picked up, this can take up to seven days to complete, often the permissions do not sync anyway.

- Archive explorer does not display the complete PF hierarchy, a very frustrating issue. Quite often when we find folders missing in Archive Explorer, they can be successfully searched using Browser Search, or vice-versa.

- Cannot export a Public Folder to psts.

- Cannot 'run now' and archive a specific folder, neither from the VAC, nor the client.

- Continual problems with searches, both in Archive Explorer and Browser Search, we often see 'Failed to perform search' returned.

[wilsond3010]

I would like to  see a way to Exclude sharepoint offline archives from the PST Migrator

also to extract cab's from secondary tape storage (i know it used to be possible)

a way to zap and do evpm via a proper gui

[Denise_Ott]

Add the Detail functionality to expired item deletion.  Currently, the auditing features does not capture the vault name, email subject, etc. in plain English.  I would like to be able to have a readable audit log when expired deletions are run.  The lack of this has prevented us from turning on the automated item expiry since we cannot identify what items have expired.

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/285115.htm  this article indicates that some of this information is logged, however, it is not logged for deletions.

It would also be good to have a feature where we can run some type of report to be able to get a listing ahead of time of what items, vaults, etc. will be affected on an expiry deletion run.

Thanks
Denise

[Matthew_Kimler]

Here's a small list:

1 - DA Copy and Paste? The DA client does not allow copying of data in various text and table sections in the client. For example, to copy the list of custodians that was in an accepted search. Or the information results of a search (bottom pane). None of that can be simply copied.

2 - DA Reports, more and better reports. Specifically around the individual cases such as errors with a particular search, size of case, size of individual search, etc.

3 - Email shortcuts in EV should contain the FQDN of the archive server and not rely on the hidden message information in the mailbox. I have this issue now where I have two seperate EV sites and a user opens a mailbox in one site and then wants to retrieve an archive from another mailbox that's in the other EV site. The client automatically assumes that the user's mailbox archive is the place to look and therefore fails to find the item.

4 - DA Analytics... I don't even know how this is even possible with a large case. Enabling analytics for one case I have seen destroy a SQL server and a NetApp filer. 10,000 IOPs to the NetApp and completely ate a 2008 SQL server with 64 GBs of RAM and 4 quad cores. Insane. It doesn't work for any case over 100,000 items.

5 - DA in general. Please assume that there are some cases that can be over 1 million holds. Maybe even 5 million. Every time I called Symantec support, I get a shocked tech who thinks the number is insanely high and claims they have never seen that before. That's extremely frustrating and pretty much confirms that #4 is not possible.

6 - For EV, we use a clustered environment for Exchange that contains only a single CAS. Because of this, I can only use 1 EV server for mailbox archiving. I would love to be able to incorporate multiple EV servers based on mailbox stores instead. Basically, it would be nice to have some additional deployment/scope options for mailbox archiving in Exchange.



I'll keep adding as I think of them.

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Hi

"3 - Email shortcuts in EV should contain the FQDN of the archive server and not rely on the hidden message information in the mailbox. I have this issue now where I have two seperate EV sites and a user opens a mailbox in one site and then wants to retrieve an archive from another mailbox that's in the other EV site. The client automatically assumes that the user's mailbox archive is the place to look and therefore fails to find the item."

Do you mean EV sites or you actually mean seperate EV directory databases?

Also for DA Analytics comment have you reviewed the DA 8 best practise guide? http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/326055.htm

[rasobey]

 Logging. Logging. LOGGING! The event log is practically useless as far as determining what an EV server is doing at any time. If I run archiving in report mode againsta specific Exchange server and no report file is generated, I want to know why it's failed. I had no choice but to restart the server to get it working again when I could have done something else.

So yes, I want to see lots more logging of activity in the event log for troubleshooting and general day to day monitoring.

[BitBucket]

Better monitoring of running tasks / processes, view status of processes / tasks, etc.  This has been discussed.

One thing that would be very useful, at least for me, is the ability to have more control over contents of archives.  Two things in this regard that I'd like to see are:

- Ability to change retention categories on exiting items in the archive.  For example, when we have an employee leave the company, I usually archive all their items in EV (both files and e-mail).  However, we are required by law to only save that information for 4 years.  It would be nice if I could change the retention category on ALL items in a person's archive to 4 years, or whatever I choose.  It would also be nice to set an expiration date on an archive so it gets completely removed from the system after a certain date.

- Ability to move items around in folders after they're archived.  For example, if e-mail items are archived with NO shortcuts in Outlook, you can't go into the browser view and move them into another folder.  This is one of my users biggest complaints and rightly so.  It severely limits EV's flexibility and inhibits people from organizing their data post-archive.

[Orca]

a better way to set permissions on archives, when managers have a new secretary the new one only has default access to what's archived when she has rights.
I would like a way to change secretaries where the old one doesn't have any rights and the new one has full access.

[The_Doctor]

Recently implemented EV8 SP3 and have to say, I am very disappointed on some basic functionality being absent.

Currently, our environment uses Hidden Network Shares and servers have their Administrative Shares disabled, (no C$, D$, etc...). This is causing us a very large headache as we wither have to enable the Administrative Shares or create Non-Hidden Network Shares. Either of which infringes on our security policy.

The other major headache, is PST's. DFS Roots do not seem to be supported, and our user store their PST's in a Home Folder, which is also hidden. We also have well over 500 PST's from employees that are no longer at the company and would like to ingest them into EV. It is not feasible to create new accounts for each former employee or attach then to a single recovery Exchange mailbox. Coming from an Electronic Data Discovery background, we ran software that would crawl though network, grab PST files, extract the data, and export the e-mail with attachments. A similar process would be very useful with the next iteration of EV.

Please include granular setting for PST Discovery. There are many servers and workstations that I do not need nor wish to have populated in my list.

After a recent decommissioning of approximately 250 workstations, the machines are not being removed from the Discovered Computers when their AD accounts are removed. It would be nice to see this dynamically updated during the next AD scan.

While I am happy to see the MMC, I would really like to remove Lotus Notes and other feature that I do not use.

We went with this product after looking at Mimosa becauss it was a former Veritas product and now backed by Symantec. It has so far not livved up to our expectations.

[MichelZ]

The Doctor

I'm sorry to hear.

You are correct with the hidden shares and things, but I believe you can get EV to do what you want using the Database.
I don't think there is a technical issue about using non-standard hidden shares for most things. You should talk with Support here..

As for the PST Files:
You might want to have a look at our Product, PST Migrator/PST Flightdeck (www.evtools.net) which enhances the built in PST Migration tools from EV.

As for the leavers in your company, you would just create a "Shared Archive" and migrate the data into those. No need to create new AD Accounts & Mailboxes.

Anything else you need? Just post it... :)

Cheers
Michel

[dfiore]

 I need the following reports to run via the web GUI while still having everything installed on an x64 server and x64 sql server.   

• Vault Store Usage Summary
• Vault Store Usage by Archive
• Vault Store Usage by Billing Account

Thank you
-Doug

[PATRICK_Kitchen]

My Head of Services has a big big moan about the shortcust in Enterprise Vault - he would like them to mirrow the iccon in Exchange so it an email has been forwarded or replied to the short cut reflects thisas well.