The search and navigation tool is available within a Web browser, with access privileges defined by the system manager.
Users on Exchange 2007 could not archive messages from their mailboxes, and one of our Exchange 2003 users couldn't always archive his own mail. We found that the plug-in worked moderately well but not perfectly. This plug-in not only allows message searching, but can be used to move messages in and out of the vault. For users, EV offers a direct plug-in for Outlook that directly links to their archived messages, along with any other vaults they have permissions to see. Some may buy EV for its retention enforcement tools and ability to offload messages from overloaded Exchange servers, but most will look at it to satisfy legal discovery and regulatory compliance. Although it has some support for linking to other IM-archiving systems, the document-based orientation of EV doesn't mesh well with the synchronous nature of IM traffic. One direct hook that EV doesn't have is into instant messaging.
EV also can archive documents in public folders within Exchange, as well as on Windows file servers and Microsoft SharePoint servers. Symantec also offers a tool kit of three applications (PST Locator, PST Collector and PST Migrator) to hunt down and archive personal mailboxes (.PST files) on individual's laptops and desktops across the enterprise. Second, because EV can operate across multiple journaling, compliance and archiving applications, you don't have copies of each message for each application. Because EV is a "write mostly" type of application with a much lower transaction rate than an Exchange server, storage cost can be much lower.
This means you need a single larger storage system rather than a series of smaller ones, as in Exchange.
First, EV maintains "single instance" storage of messages even across different Exchange servers. However, we found that EV can save message space in several ways. Once the message is controlled by EV, you can apply a range of retention policies, enforcing automatic deletion in the end.Īlthough the integration with Exchange is slick, we were concerned that moving messages out of Exchange and into EV trades off one storage nightmare for another. When EV has its fingers deep into the mailbox, it can grab messages and move them to the vault, leaving behind a shortcut that will let the user get at the message moved to the EV message store. The second link to Exchange for EV is directly into each user's mailbox. Management console and user interface 25%Ĭheck out our E-mail Archiving Buyer's Guide Scoring Key: 5: Exceptional 4: Very good 3: Average 2: Below average 1: Subpar or not available
We turned on journaling for Exchange 2007 on the messaging hub and verified that messages sent using an Exchange 2007 server were captured by EV according to policy. In Exchange 2007, Microsoft requires that all messages go through a messaging hub (even if they are passed between users in the same message store) and then provides a way for third-party applications, such as EV, to get copies of those messages as they fly by. First, it can link into the journaling capability of Exchange to get a copy of every message that passes through your mail system. In our tests using Exchange 2007, we focused on e-mail applications as the most likely and interesting data stores for enterprise IT. We did not test archiving performance but focused on the product's integration capabilities and its search and recovery features (see How we tested Enterprise Vault). Subscribe to the Network Product Test Results newsletterĮV is heavily linked into Microsoft Exchange clients, so we were also able to see benefits for users - including automated message archiving and deletion - tightly integrated into the Outlook e-mail client.