From time to time it might be necessary to try to recreate shortcuts for Enterprise Vault archived items. Unfortunately there isn't yet a sophisticated way to do this, it's a lot of manual effort. In this blog I'll explain the way that this currently done:
The Idea
The idea is that we can export the whole of an archive to PST, delete all the shortcut items, and then reimport the PST recreating every single shortcut as we go along.
The downsides
If the user has the option to delete just shortcuts, legitimately, then following this approach will bring them all back. This might be what the user wants, on the other hand it might annoy the user. There are some ways and means around this, for example you could elect not reimport anything for the user, just give them the PST file of their archive. Calendar, contacts and other non-shortcut archived items might end up getting duplicated, if they've been archived in the past... since we have no easy way to delete them.
The prep
You have to make sure that the user option for deleting shortcuts is set to either 'ask' or 'shortcut only' otherwise the items will be deleted from the archive too
In practice
The high level process is:
- Export the archive to PST
- Create a search folder in Outlook, where the message class is IPM.Note.EnterpriseVault.Shortcut
- Select items in batches and delete them using the search folder
- Reimport the PST file, selecting the option to recreate shortcuts along the way
Variations
During the export you may wish to delete the items from the archive as you go along. I'd suggest, in order to have a belt and braces approach, that you export to PST twice. The second time around you delete the items from the archive too.
Summary
It's a pain to have to do things this way, maybe there is a tool-possibility in this area! Have you ever followed a procedure like this to recreate mass-accidentally deleted shortcuts? Let me know in the comments below.
