Microsoft Exchange Administrators Should Like Symantec Enterprise Vault (Part 1)

Many organizations implement Enterprise Vault to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements.  Enterprise Vault does a great job at archiving journaled messages and provides legal, compliance and HR department’s quality backend search tools to search and export archived email.  But what’s in it for the Exchange Administrators who already have enough to worry about keeping email running smoothly?  You can hear it already, “we purchased a new application for e-discovery called Enterprise Vault that you need to learn and implement.  Oh, by the way you will be supporting it going forward as well”.  Don’t throw up your hands.  Read on.

The ability to control Exchange database sizes, prevent the PST sprawl, cheaper disk storage, and easier Exchange upgrades and moves are a few of the reasons why Exchange Administrators should like Enterprise Vault.  Let me tell you about controlling Exchange database sizes.

We all know that Microsoft Exchange is more manageable and easier to support when database and mailbox sizes are restricted.  I often see 100 MB – 300 MB mailbox size limits.  Typically this is not a size limit that users are happy with, especially with unified messaging and other new messaging technologies only making mailbox sizes bigger.  What if you could keep the database sizes small and still give your users practically unlimited mailbox sizes.  Well with Enterprise Vault you can.   Once Enterprise Vault is implemented you can finally run that Eseutil job you have been putting off for weeks due to the time and space it takes to run.

With Enterprise Vault email archiving you can set-up user mail to be archived after a specified number of days, a percent of quota, or both.  This means that you don’t have to choose between making users unhappy by implementing mailbox size restrictions or quotas and keeping your Exchange environment manageable by limiting the amount of data being stored.  Enterprise Vault typically is set-up to run nightly.   Base upon the settings you define it removes Exchange email from the Exchange server and moves it to an Enterprise Vault archive while performing deduplication and compression.  A small shortcut is left behind in Exchange so the users can access the mail item as they did before.  For the most part it is seamless to the end users.  You get the Exchange space savings and the users get to save more mail.  It’s a win/win.

If you are unfamiliar with Enterprise Vault take a look at Symantec’s website.  It is a great resource to lean more.  Take a look at Enterprise Vault for Microsoft Exchange to get you started.

In my next blog I will discuss how Enterprise Vault can help you control and eliminate all those pesky PSTS floating around your organization.

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