Wish List

[David_Messeng1]

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

[David_Messeng1]

Thanks Matt. I assume this is stated for the general good and not for my benefit as to be honest, there is nothing new there for me!

Maybe I'm a bit fussy but I've no desire to pass 120,000 exchange mailboxes across 2 EV servers when it should be 1 if I can possibly avoid it :)

I'm pretty convinced that the EV server acting as the directory link is an SPF. I agree that a mailbox or an Exchange Store or a SQL database is always an SPF as well but with this I have less problems. I can put resilience around SQL or Exc. Both are excellent pieces of software, tried trusted and properly tested with an excellent support structure and plenty of documentation, whereas Enterprise Vault is... er... a piece ofsoftware... ;)

[Matthew_Edwards]

Yeah - it was intended for the general good, that's why I put the storage/index limit as my wish for your list. I'm currently looking at re-structuring EV for a couple of largish organisations (~10TB data) and it isn't looking pretty at the moment!

On the Directory point, have you put a directory service on all your other EV servers in the site?

[David_Messeng1]

Yeah. Not sure you can build an Ev box without a Dir service can you?

[Matthew_Edwards]

Yes - if it's the second server in a site. When you install you are asked whether or not you want to create a directory service or join an existing site. The directory service on the second server would be created by using the 'update service locations' (part of building blocks). Once the second server is using its own directory service, it will not be reliant on the first server (unless SQL is running locally on it).

EV - Don't ya luv it ? ;)

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Part of the upgrade to V6 sp1 will put a directory service on every EV server from now on.

[Matthew_Edwards]

True. I think David's company is on V5 -hence the question.

Thanks for the update Dodo.

[David_Messeng1]

I am. As far as I understand it, every server has a Dir service but there is a primary (default is 1st server). If we lose the box for a signifigant amount of time we run USL to "promote" another box, but if the fist box goes AWOL and we don't notice the whole system is kyboshed.

From Dodo, this is fixed in 6?

To be honest it bothers me less than it used to. The fault is actually in our atrocious systems management set up which constantly fails to fire when there are issues (and if it does it goes through 15 people before the alert hits me). I got so peed off with this that I wrote a bit of code to txt me every time it lost sight of an EV service so it's not really an issue for us these days (excpet I'm now permanently on call!)

Still an unneccesary SPF in an Enterprise product though... good to see it's fixed, well done Symantec! Happy person :)

[Brian_Spooner]

1.) Unified search across archived and non-archived items. I understand the non-archived items are not in the Vault indexes, but why can't they programatically "pass off" your search criteria to Outlook, do the regular Outlook search in the background, capture the results of that search and then throw them in with the archived index results? Seems like that should certainly be possible.

2.) Archive Explorer folder re-synchronization. If you've moved your folders around it makes this tool almost useless! I don't understand why it's taking so long to fix this.

[David_Messeng1]

Symantec have to do this. Their indexing is looking less impressive now Google (Desktop Search) and Microsoft (LookOut) can index everything but your Vault. Indexing now becomes a reason NOT to use EV....

[Leon_Funnell]

A utility that can recover SIS when enabling mailboxes that have identical items to ones in CAB files already. We need to do this now, as we haev 300+ users who arent enabled yet, and we have about 5 years of mail already journalled using about 700GB - all collected in to cabs.

[Glenn_Martin]

Amen to that one, I'd love to extend the request to items in closed partitions. In the past, I've accepted the rules about SIS in cabs and partitions. It's annoyed me over the last couple of years as we get round to migrating PSTs which I know will have instances in our cabs or older partitions but have just had to accept the fact that we'll have to use a bit more storage. Then recently I was at a Zantas presentation (purely to understand the competition rather than seriously be thinking we'll migrate out of EV to EAS) and their big claim is that they can do SIS over an entire enterprise becuase they just need to use a single DB for the vault. I question the scalability claims and would love to meet a seasoned EAS user to prove/disprove this claim. Anyway, I'm not bothered about SIS to this level....just provide it within a single EV server and I'd be happy.

On the note about CABs, has anyone noticed the subtle change to collections in V6 SP2, max filesize is now 99Mb not 200Mb, hopefully this won't cause older CABs which are 200Mb any problems....or am I being paranoid?

Out of interest.....has anyone checked off the number of items on the wish list that have been fullfilled yet?

Cheers
Glenn

[Scott_Anderso1]

I'd like to have EVPM enhanced so that it could do everything that you can do in the administration interface. Full scripting capability.

[David_Messeng1]

Hey Glenn,

As a company we use EAS. Also the bloke who sits next to me at work put in one of the larger installations in the UK. He loved it. But then he probably would say that ;)

S'funny but I'm probably in quite a good position now to directly compare 3 of the market leaders in email archving thru direct experience. Funny becuase all I really want is one that works properly ....

Ah well, probably not the right thread for all this.


David

[Glenn_Martin]

Thanks David, hopefully we're all quite some way from having to start a new forum dedicated to EV to EAS conversions. I'm sure it would be a case of same s%&t different product, that's why I'd rather continue to push Symantec and make them deliver a stable product that I don't have to tend daily and do my eventlog weeding (or actually figure out which EV weeds are OK to leave and which ones need to be dug up and burnt.

Anyway, you're right, I just want one product that works well and hopefully that will be EV.

[David_Messeng1]

Security concerns with EAS. STORM is good though.