Troubleshooting a mailbox that will not archive in Enterprise Vault
One of the most common questions asked by Enterprise Vault administrators on the Symantec Connect forums is: “Why does this mailbox not get archived?”. There are many different reasons why the mailbox may not be archiving, and in this article we'll go through several of them.How to open an archived item
Opening an Exchange/Outlook email which has been archived by Enterprise Vault might to some people seem like the simplest of things to do in the entire universe, with Enterprise Vault. There are a number of different things at play though, so in this article I will describe several ways that archived items can be opened, and what might be 'different' in each situation/case. - Double click This is the classic way to open an archived item, provided of course the archived item in the mailbox got replaced by a shortcut. With the introduction and adoption of things like Virtual Vault it is now not 110% of the time that shortcuts get created. Needless to say double clicking on a shortcut in Outlook is quite likely to be the most natural way that people open archived items. It's not the only way that you can double click on an item though - you can do this in OWA, Windows Explorer (via searching with Windows Search), Office 2011 for Mac, and more! Double click is almost everywhere because of the different extensions, or add-ins, that Enterprise Vault provides. These add-ins and extensions intercept or enhance the functionality, and, in most cases, handle the retrieval of the 'full' item based on information in the shortcut. - Forward an archived item If you click on a shortcut, and then click on 'Forward', the Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-in will retrieve the item, and put it in the message that is being forwarded. This is important because you may be forwarding the mail to someone who is inside your organisation, but not an Enterprise Vault user, or someome outside your organisation. Like the 'double click' description above, it is also possible to invoke this type of opening of an item from other applications other than Outlook - again all made possible by add-ins and extensions which come with Enterprise Vault? - Search and open The Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-in has an 'integrated' search feature which lets end users search archived items. The result list is just a snippet of the email, and when you've located the one that you think you want to see more of, you will single click the link, and the full item will be retrieved and displayed. This, I would call, is 'Search and open'. It's quite common if you're looking for something that is old, and archived. For example if you know that everything over 6 months old is archived, then searching for something is the best way to try to find it - and it doesn't rely on the shortcut being in the mailbox, because the search takes place against the archive, on the server, with the result list returned to the end-user. - Browser Search and open Some end-users prefer to use Browser Search, perhaps because it has more powerful searching and filtering possibilities. Just like the 'integrated' search I mentioned just now when you look at the list of results, you have the option to click one of them and see them, and there is a 'view original item' link which will open the full original item for you. - Archive Explorer and open Another way that people open an archived item is to use Archive Explorer. This is an inbox/mailbox type interface in to your archived items, and, when you double click on an item in Archive Explorer it will be retrieved for the end-user. There are also options relating to the right clicking of an item, and being able to move or copy an item to a folder in the mailbox - this will also cause a retrieval. - Virtual Vault Virtual Vault is used by many people, and depending on the policy settings, opening an item from inside Virtual Vault will result in the item being retrieved and displayed to the user. If the item is already in the content cache, ie vault cache, then the item will be retrieved from vault cache, ie local disk, rather than downloading the item from the Enterprise Vault server. - Vault Cache Very similar to the above description is opening an item from Vault Cache. This doesn't have to be from inside Outlook though, it can be from the 'start' menu in Windows 7 for example. What happens with regards to Vault Cache and Virtual Vault comes about from various policy settings, which I won't get into in this article. Needless to say you'll either have 'all' the archived content, or none, or storing-opened-items. This last one is quite interesting. What it means is that initially nothing is stored locally, there is only the MDC file (the virtual vault, aka metadata cache). When an item is retrieved, it is stored locally, not thrown away. This means that if the same item is retrieved again, via another double click, even several days/weeks later, the item will then come from vault cache, rather than from the Enterprise Vault server. It's an interesting policy to consider. Many hats As you can see opening an archived email can take many many different forms. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' way in my mind, but users may or may not know about the different possibilities. In fact, you might find that users don't know about many of these different options -- perhaps you can help educate them by having training sessions highlighting some of these possibilities? These different ways of opening archived items are made possible by various 'extensions' to Enterprise Vault; either the Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-in, the OWA Add-in, Mac Add-in, and so on. If you don't have all these installed and configured then some of these options aren't going to be available to your end-users. Have you encountered an odd twist in the listed items? Have I missed any out? Let me know in the comments below...Journal Mailbox folders with Enterprise Vault
Have you ever looked inside an Exchange journal mailbox after it's been targeted with Enterprise Vault? If you have never opened your Enterprise Vault journal mailbox with Outlook, then you should! In this article I'll give a brief list of the folders that the mailbox may contain and what they mean to the health of your Enterprise Vault journaling environment. Remember that not all of these folders will be present, and even if some are it doesn't mean that you have to immediately try to change something to 'fix' a problem. The list is more for you to gain an understanding of what the folders are, and what they might mean. Above Maximum Size In the Enterprise Vault journaling policy you can configure a limit to the size of the messages that will be journal archived. Hopefully your Exchange administrators are sensible and have some sort of maximum message size in place on the Exchange environment, so you could mirror that same size in this particular policy setting, or, you could take the decision that you want the Enterprise Vault maximum to be lower. Whatever limit you set in the Enterprise Vault policy messages exceeding that limit will be placed here. A lot of items in the folder may mean you have either got the policy setting wrong, or something else is wrong in your environment causing massive messages to arrive (and be left unprocessed) I always think it is a good idea to have (sensible) limits in place. The default is as you seen in the screenshot, 250 Mb. That to me seems quite large, users shouldn't really be emailing files/messages of that size. However, if the limit is too high, or too low, you can adjust it. You can even set it to zero, which means that there is no limit whatsoever. I advise against using the 'no limit' option option however. One thing to remember here is that items above the size limit you specify will be left in the journal mailbox meaning that the mailbox grow in size. Here is the folder in the journal mailbox on my test environment: Failed Codepage xyz The appropriate code pages are needed in order to process messages with that code page. So to fix this problem you should install the correct code page, or use the default ANSI code page. After you've done that step you should move these messages back in to the Inbox to be processed by the journal task. This folder shouldn't really contain any items, so if it does, rectify the problem and then retry the messages. You can force Enterprise Vault to use the default code page by removing the entry from CodePages.txt file shown in the Enterprise Vault program folder. Failed DL Expansion If Distribution List expansion is turned on in the journaling policy (and it should be for journaling!) any distribution list expansion failures will result in the message being moved to this folder. The folder should not contain any items really, a build up of messages here might mean that Enterprise Vault is talking to a Global Catalogue server which has incomplete data. You can set the option in the policy to archive the item anyway, even though it failed distribution list expansion, but before doing so it is worth investigating why the failure is happening in the first place. Remember that if you archive the item anyway, then you're compromising in someways the integrity of the data because you can not prove who did or didn't receive that particular message. Failed External Filter This contains messages which have failed to be processed by a custom filter. A build up of messages here means that the filter might not be correct. The event log sometimes contains more information about the reason for the failure. Of course if you don't use custom filters then nothing should be in this folder. Failed to copy This is usually messages which are corrupt. You can try dragging them to your desktop and double clicking on them. If they open correctly you can try dragging them back to the journal Inbox for reprocessing. Again a big build-up of messages here isn't healthy for your environment. Failed to store This folder contains messages which cannot be archived. They may have failed because of an issue with the Storage Service. Again this folder shouldn't have any items in it, and if it does you may want to see if there is an issue with the storage service, rectify it, then drag and drop the items back to the Inbox in the journal mailbox and try them again. Invalid Journal Report This contains messages where the P1 envelope message doesn't conform to Microsoft standards. This folder should also not contain any items. In the past I've seen items in this folder when Antivirus software has modified the P1 message because of suspect content. The net result here is that these various folders should be pretty much empty all of the time in a healthy Enterprise Vault Exchange journaling environment. You can also see how it is important to check the journal mailbox regularly, as a build of messages may indicate a problem, and if nothing else is likely to mean that your journal mailbox starts to get very big, very quickly. How do you monitor your journal mailboxes? Have you ever had a build of items in any of these queues? Let me know in the comments below... Reference: Monitoring journal mailboxes
Setting up Highly Available Enterprise Vault Structure with Windows Failover Cluster
Hello all, In this article I want to cover the steps of two nodes Enterprise Vault Failover Cluster with Windows Failover Cluster Feature. Actually I prepared a guide before and I want to share it. If you have any suggestion it would be improving.
