Enterprise Vault 11.0 has now been available for 6 months and two hotfixes have been released. Now all the early issues have crawled out of the woodwork and have been addressed, we feel it is a good time to address the new features added.
New Enterprise Search
We have been hugely impressed by the new Search upgrades introduced in Enterprise Vault 11. The previous ways of searching your archive (Archive Explorer and Archive Search) have been integrated into one more effective, easier-on-the-eye and inventively named(!) “Enterprise Vault Search”.
As you can see, users now have the ability to search their archives simultaneously by a string search function and a folder structure view – all packaged together in a much more polished UI. This UI also has the option of customisation including a preview of the archived item, as displayed.
Storage Location
The ability to select a location for where the safety copies exist has been introduced in the form of the Storage Queue Location in Enterprise Vault 11 and can really be beneficial when reclaiming space from the Exchange server completely.
Adding to the options of either keeping the original item in Exchange until a successful backup of the archived item has been verified by Enterprise Vault or removing the item immediately after the item is archived without determining whether it has been secured or not, there is now an option to take a copy of the item and hold them in temporary storage until the archived item has been successfully backed up.
While this can be very beneficial in reclaiming space from Exchange immediately by taking a copy, holding it on cheaper storage and stripping the original item from Exchange, the storage location must always have enough free space in order to hold these items until a successful backup has been completed and verified on the Enterprise Vault Server.
In addition to ensuring the storage has extra space available, a recovery plan for placing the items back into Exchange needs to be in place as well.
IMAP – Enabling Archive Access to Mobile Users
By setting the Enterprise Vault Server to act as an IMAP Server, users can access their archived items from mobile devices, such as phones and tablets.
IMAP is configured by selecting Enterprise Vault to work server as an endpoint that allows IMAP connections, creating a separate DNS alias for the Enterprise Vault Server and publishing the alias externally.
While this is a brilliant added feature, there are a few downsides. Obviously, we find some customers are reluctant to publish the Enterprise Vault Server externally. As well as this, if all users were to be enabled for IMAP access, the SQL database could double in size. Finally, while users do have access to their archives from their mobile devices, is does not integrate with their native mail application. The IMAP access essentially creates a mailbox on the mobile device that is solely access to their archive. It is much like a mobile version of Archive Explorer.
Despite all this, this is a fantastic addition to Enterprise Vault 11 and provides much needed mobile access to users that are based off-site a lot. The users that are enabled for IMAP access can be configured using a similar procedure to the Provisioning tasks and policy settings currently in place in Enterprise Vault, so the database growth can be controlled.