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





 

[Liam_Finn1]

 How about the option of running EV on Oracle including the indexes. For very large environments Oracle is a very powerful solution in which large databases can perform extremely well. Also in an oracle environment you can have the indexes in the database also so there is only one location of everything.

On large environments Oracle will also give the ability of dynamic load balancing the data across many servers so they all share the workload and a database would not reside on any one single DB server so less chance of failure.


Also what about the option of running EV withing a Linux environment. It would offer great reduction in costs on the customers because of the OS overhead would be eliminated

[Karim_KK_KHEDDA]

• How about the option to exclude folder to be archived in users mailboxes without using EVPM ?
• In Deployment scanner, deploy MSMQ tuning and Windows pre requisites (Disableloopbackcheck and DisablestrictNameChecking)
• During the install of EV on cluster, if you don't provide the license file, the MSMQ$MSMQ will be corrupted, so you have to uninstall EV + MSMQ and then reinstall. Why don't you provide a clean wizard to uninstall ressources type and ressources in the cluster ?
• Change  centera partition configuration to automatically discover replicate instead of clicking on save to discover and save them.

 

[Karim_KK_KHEDDA]

Netbackup 7 will provide an enterprise vault agent. NBU7 will permit to backup open partition without having to change NBU policy.

BE 12.5 already integrate this functionality.

Regards,

Karim KHEDDAR

[ckadmin]

Would be nice to determine how much vualt space each user is using.

[Hans_Peeters]

On client PC, extend the info shown on details tab of "vault cache properties"

- show begin & end date of vault cache
- show begin & end date of online archive
--> user will better understand why some emails open locally and older mails open online

- Show info about DownloadItemAgeLimit
It is very difficult for a help-desk to see if user used the option DownloadItemAgeLimit during initial creation of vault cache.

- Allow users to extend the vault cache if initial creation of vault cache was done with a DownloadItemAgeLimit value
Currently you have to reset the vault cache if you want a bigger one. (see forum topic and answer of symantec)
For me a very weird sollution and takes a lot of bandwith. 50% of our users are working remote.

[Christopher_Sor]

how about workstation archiving.  Make it a agent like DLO backup.

[Christopher_Sor]

better documentation and support on report services

[Christopher_Sor]

Active Directory integration when deleting users and exchange along DA and ADSync should handle this instead of complaining.

[maj_rif]

Hi,
I believe lot of suggestions is there to improve the EV although lots of suggestions are there,
 

• 
  I’m not very happy with the searching of Enterprise Vault on the client side and search explorer
• Searching in the search explorer is quite pathetic. The same email will appear on the client side twice (Attachment and email)
• Monitoring is difficult in Enterprise Vault and there should be a better way of it
• There is no interactive way to monitor the archiving on Server side. Like backup solutions always give you the statistics how much backup is completed. In EV we have to monitor the MSMQ every time to find either archiving is happening or not.
• User should have the ability to correlate the task with policy. Now there is only one task for all policies.
• Partition Failover bit confusing. There should be another way of it

 

[Wayne_Humphrey]

Hi Maj,

Please find my comments in-line:

"I’m not very happy with the searching of Enterprise Vault on the client side and search explorer"
This is been looked into and changed in coming versions.
 

"Searching in the search explorer is quite pathetic. The same email will appear on the client side twice (Attachment and email)"

Well, this has nothing to do with search this has to do with Item Level Granularity.
 

Searching a large number of indexes with several hot words or phrases can consume a considerable amount of memory. Item Level Granularity was introduced to allow these searches to use much less memory and increase search performance.

When using Item Level Granularity if a search matches the content of an item, the search result will contain both the main item and the attachment.  If a search matches an archived attachment then the search result will contain both the attachment and the message it was contained in, this also including full phrases in the content.

Item Level Granularity combines the information from attachments into the top level parent document.

Location HKLM\SOFTWARE\KVS\EnterpriseVault\Indexing

Name SchemaType

Type DWORD

Value 1

"Monitoring is difficult in Enterprise Vault and there should be a better way of it"
Enterprise Vault is not a monitoring application, It is an Archiving Application, Use something like MOM or NetIQ.
 

"There is no interactive way to monitor the archiving on Server side. Like backup solutions always give you the statistics how much backup is completed. In EV we have to monitor the MSMQ every time to find either archiving is happening or not."
Yes there is, loads. Just search the forum or look at a free tool called MSMQ Monitor http://www.evtools.net/products/msmqmonitor
 

"User should have the ability to correlate the task with policy. Now there is only one task for all policies."

What do you mean by this? Policy's are controlled with Provisioning groups and have nothing to do with tasks.

"Partition Failover bit confusing. There should be another way of it"
There is no such thing as Partition Fail-over.... What do you mean? this makes no seance.

[Mohawk_Marvin]

Wayne, I believe he means Partition Rollover, hower I think this is a fairly decent addition and works fine in v8 so perhaps Maj.Rif can elaborate more?

[Batmanfail]

"There is no such thing as Partition Fail-over.... What do you mean? this makes no seance."

I have to agree with Wayne, a Partition Fail-over does not make a Seance.  Communicating with spirits is outside the scope of EV, you should contact a Medium in your local area, or alternatively a gypsy woman...

[zubair_chowgale]

i vote for the following:

1) videos on how to's
2) easier OWA setup
3) easier client driven migration
4) better support

[dglasgow]

Lets get access to the vault directly on the blackberry and with activesync, not just through a web page. I want the ability to file messages in my Blackberry to the vault folders directly, like the virtual vault. Also, the ability to search the vault with a better interface than the web browser and that integrates with email so that you can forward or reply to vault archived messages from the BB. An App would be better than the browser.

[nikolas]

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. Nikolas D poker calculator

[Murd]

A search engine that is up to today’s standards

The command line search seems very broken
 
Example
 
I search a dir for "" and get all files in the dir
I search a dir for *.* and get all files
I search a dir for *.jpg and the filter works
 
I search a dir for *.jp* and no results
I search a dir for 3469*.jpg and no results - There are 10 files that start with 3469
I search a dir for 3469*.* and 10 *.jpg files returned
 
Some documentation to go with it. IE a white paper on Enterprise Vault command line searching.


Folder level partition rollovers for vault partitions

I read the comments about this, could the quota framework help? My testing showed EV saw a folder run out of space and reported the error correctly "*** Error *** - There is not enough space on the disk. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070070)" surely this would be enough result to fire a rollover. I'm using windows quota on a 2008 R2 64 Bit server

Cloning a new partition
The ability to create a clone partition from one you previously created. The chances are only the path changes 

True 64 Bit
Not having 64 bit compiled PowerShell shell.
"c:\Program Files (x86)\Enterprise Vault\EVShell.psc1"
And the reports I can’t use.
 
 Monitoring
It would be nice to know what tasks are running at any time without needed to trawl through *\InProgress\ directories.
The ability to get alerts via email, SMS when tasks start, finish or error with a log summary.
The ability to get alerts via email, SMS when the site status changes.

Tailoring the installs
I'm only using FSA, why do i need to install Outlook and MSMQ.
I'm only using FSA, is it necessary to have Exchange, Domino and SharePoint targets, policies and archives. 

Tidy up the documentation
On install you install MSMQ but it’s not until you run the Deployment Scanner you find that it need to be moved to a non-system drive.
                The instructions to move the MSMQ paths are broken. In Windows Server 2008 a bunch of permissions need to be set for this to work.
Turning off or reconfiguring Windows Firewall in Windows Server 2008 – Really, you recommend to turn it off?
**For guidelines on how to use DCOM with firewalls, see the following article: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms809327.aspx**- This article does not exist
And many more examples.
 
A codebank
A lot of tasks could be performed with scripts. A vetted repository housed by Symantec  would be useful instead of users reinventing the wheel each time.
 

I'm yet to start testing Email archiving so will update my thoughts on this at a later date.
 

[Ldoodle]

Incorporate the full GUI right into the email client. Nobody wants to manage 2 'seperate' interfaces, certainly not here they don't!

This is the single thing stopping us from getting EV and similar products. Hopefully v9 will drop the web GUI.

[TonySterling]

By web GUI do you mean the search page and archive explorer page?

[MichelZ]

Hi

Have a look at "Virtual Vault" functionality, as this might be exactly what you want.
The Archive is then displayed like a PST File in Outlook.

Cheers
Michel

[jprknight-oldax]

I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this before as I have not read the whole thread but:

I would like to see more useful information in the admin console for each EV archive. Additional columns I would like to see:

EV Server
Exchange Server