cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Wish List

David_Messeng1
Level 6
Everyone,

this thread is intended as a place to post the things you would most like to see in Enterprise Vault (any flavour, any version).

My starter for 10 is to re-iterate one that's come up a few times in various places and that is the ability to move items around in Archive Explorer, (including folders -- which you can't do anything to at all at the moment). One of the major complaints I get from users is that once they have moved their shortcuts around in their mailbox AE does not update to reflect the changes. Some sort of user-side batch to update this might be possible but I would prefer AE to be more flexible (in which case we won't need shortcuts anymore).

Anyone got any thoughts or other things for the list?


David
34 REPLIES 34

shay_mayo
Level 2
Deleted Item Retention would be nice!!!!

shay_mayo
Level 2
Oh, I also forgot to mention it would be nice if they would hire a 2nd technical support rep so it wouldnt take a week to get a returned phone call from them...

Shay

David_Messeng1
Level 6
Yes, I agree with Deleted Item retention. I don't think I'm fussy about how they do it. Of course the problem with Outlook Deleted Items is that semi-savvy users start to use it as another part of their Mailbox for general storage. And then it get's moved to their PST and then they wonder where it's gone when I don't migrate it to their Vault. They also have no sense of the ironic when asking that items placed in a waste bin called "Deleted Items" be found as they really did want them...

Another thing I would like is either more MMC bolt-ons or an admin tree that understands administrative roles. This would allow us to delegate admin functions out but take away the really powerful bits of the admin tool so the 1st line guys can't break anything when they increase quotas or create new vaults, etc.

Glenn_Martin
Level 6
Employee Accredited
Thanks David.....I suspect we could dedicate a whole forum to what we'd like to be added but I think this is a good start.

My List: (specific to EV for Exchange)

1) Unified search tool - to allow seamless searching of archive & non-archived items

2) A method to group archives together to allow different polices to be applied. I know in V6 there is an attempt at this but that is using OU's which isn't good enough. We'd like to use AD groups or just a simple internal EV grouping method. Then we could choose how to apply site policies to different users. Eg. setting shortcut removal to 2 years for most users but perhaps no shortcut removal for others.

3) A MOM management pack to help us deal with all the "Event Rich" environment that is EV.

4) Some nicer reporting & capacity management tools, I know there's some good stuff in the EV DB so some canned reports would be good, this could be fed into MOM perhaps through integration with SQL reporting services.

5) A tool to deal with orphaned vaults, ie. when a mailbox is deleted the vault remains albeit in an orphaned state. We try to deal with this ourselves by renaming accounts before they're deleted but it's not foolproof. Perhaps a seperate posting is required on this topic but I know that dealing with "leavers" is a problem that will build with time.

That's enough for now....I'm sure there'll be more.
Glenn

Michael_Bilsbor
Level 6
Accredited
Hi,

In V6 there is a MOM pack.

David_Messeng1
Level 6
I too was a bit disappointed that EV6 targeting was at the OU level. My thoughts were that it would be much more flexible if you could define an LDAP query (which my guess is what the software must be doing under the covers anyway). You could then target your policies based on AD attribute content or Group membership.

David_Messeng1
Level 6
No one else? :(

How about the search being integrated to the AD (i.e. Outlook's Address Book and/or your Contacts) so you resolve and pick the right John Smith when searching for stuff?

How about an Advanced Find that allows you to search on more discrete units of time than just months and years? (i.e. days and weeks)

David_Messeng1
Level 6
Me again. Do we care about Blackberries? In theory only mail that has been archived before it has been read on the Blackberry should be a problem, but if you allow the Archive Now button then this could occur...

Scott_Lewis_2
Level 4
How about "auto restore from vault" when you embedded an archived item into an out-going email?

Ability not to have your entire vault downloaded if you use offline folders and Archive Explorer (would like to see this as an option)

Allow only certain users to delete (goes back to policies being at the OU level)

Glenn_Martin
Level 6
Employee Accredited
Absolutely, echo David's point about Blackberry.

We're big users of BB and a common scenario is that someone is out of the office for a while,their mailbox quota gets exceeded and thenthey can't send email. It would be nice to be able to.

1) Allow archive from BlackBerry, might help the user to get back within quota.

2) Provide a lite version of the EV search tool that can run on a BB, in theory we could do something similar ourselves as our BB's are allowed to browse but a nice cut down BB client version would be nice.

3) And while we're at it, why not include some clever bit of BB code that would allow you search and then restore to your inbox, this would be incredibly useful for the times you need to remotely grab that really old message and forward it to someone.

3) We don't remove body text but I can imagine for sites that do, it would be handy to be able to auto pull down the full message when on a BB.

I guess perhaps, ditto this for all the Windows Mobile users out there.

Looking forward to it already
Glenn

David_Messeng1
Level 6
Oh yeah - and the ability to archive your PST directly (ie a user) without having to go through the mailbox (and fill it up which will stop archiving working...)

And a supported way to cull the audit database.

Michael_Bilsbor
Level 6
Accredited
PST migration doesn't put items into the mailbox. They do go directly from PST into EV.

It only moves shortcuts(if configured) and items of message classes you've configured EV not to archive.
Or are you talking about client side PST migration which is a feature of V6

David_Messeng1
Level 6
Errr... Dodo, I've migrated 0000s of PSTs... 000s of Gbs of the buggers. Of *course* I mean client side, user-initiated. I've not tested v6 yet but it wasn't in the Beta so I'm skeptical about it, epecially as most users do not know what a .pst file is!

David_Messeng1
Level 6
Oh yes, another thing. I want .nsf import capability. And I need it now!!

Aaron_Mears
Level 4
Employee Accredited Certified
How about more overall reporting. What is stored, by user mailbox, in the journal archive? What volume trends? What kind of efficiency are we getting from shared archives (single instance storage)

How about a EVPM reporter...or some way to know the actual in-place settings accurately for each archive and folder...or maybe just report in the client GUI what the settings really are.

A few white papers, or sample company docs that take you through design, sizing and mangement for the different features, PST migrations.

Some way to throttle restore requests...so a user cannot request a 10GB restore and push it back into their maibox and crash Exchange due to transaction log growth.

Aaron

David_Messeng1
Level 6
These are good points, especially like that one about limiting restores.

Also like Scott's idea for detecting embedding and causing a restore but for the life of me I can't see how they could code that!

I guess it's a fine line. EV has to keep it's paws out of Exchange. We wouldn't want it to actually mod the Store in any way so there's only so far you can go. Maybe MS need to produce a "shortcut API" (a la AVAPI for AV)?

Another one I'd like is the ability to prevent user's from adding an archived folder to an Inbox rule. We have users (bless 'em) who copy all their incoming email to a folder that is 100% archived and then delete it when they read it. Does wonders for store fragmentation and audit trails...

Matthew_Edwards
Level 4
Well, here's my first post in this forum....

For my penny's worth I would like to see index locations or vault stores not exclusively tied to one server's indexing or storage service - it would make archives far more portable between vault servers within each vault site and would mean that we could load balance across services which have available capacity.

Are you listening in Green Park guys?

David_Messeng1
Level 6
Hey Matt,

this is a limiting factor on our design as well. We don't want too many mailboxes orphaned from their main EV archiving service.

>> quick explanatory note

EV server A archives Exch server 1. Mailbox is moved to Exch server 2 which is archived by EV server B. Still works but is not something we want a lot of.

>> end of explanatory note :)

How do you design against this?

To allow us to scale, we built our servers with 3 stores each so we can triple the server capacity (I reckon we could do 100,000 users) but the obvious risk is reducing our SIS by 1/3rd...

Here's a question. Is the directory server still an SPF? It certainly does appear so and that would be a bad thing.

Matthew_Edwards
Level 4
Hi David

The 'orphaned' mailbox scenario is at present unavoidable. To put this in context though, these mailboxes are not orphaned from their archives, but are now on an Exchange server which is archived by another vault server. In this scenario, the new vault server is responsible for archive/retrieval operations for the moved mailbox, but the old vault server is responsible for its storage/indexes. In practice this is not a problem if the vault servers have good bandwidth between them, but if they are geographically dispersed (i.e. across a WAN link) then it would be better to disable the mailbox from archiving, export the corresponding archive to intermediary PSTs (with the export config file intact), delete the archive on the source vault server, create a new one using the enable mailbox wizard on the new vault server and then import the PSTs (the config file will re-knit all of the shortcuts in the mailbox so that they point to the new archive.) This is a pain in the posterior, I know, but at present it is the only option because of the architectural limitations I mentioned in my previous post.

As for the Directory service, I wouldn't necessarily call it a SPF. It would be more appropriate to define the SQL EnterpriseVaultDirectory database as the SPF since you can (and should) create a directory service on all of your EV servers in the site that point to the same database. Therefore an external HA mechanism for the SQL server (such as a cluster) would be the best recommendation. The bigger problem with the directory service is that it must point to a single SQL instance, which means that if you have a geographically remote EV server, it must traverse the WAN link for directory access. In such cases I would recommend creating a seperate EV Directory for these servers with a SQL server that is closer by.

:)