The PST Problem?
Despite the existence of many viable data archiving solutions, PST files continue to exist and increase with users. Many existing Enterprise Vault customers are still struggling with the PST proliferation problem and PST files elimination remains a major factor in purchasing an email archiving solution.
How can Enterprise Vault help?
PST Migration capabilities have existed in Enterprise Vault for a long time, but they needed to be enhanced to meet the evolving challenge of the PST problem and our customers' requriements. Just some of the challenges that we are addressing in recent releases include
- scaling to environments where there are large number of PST files and computers,
- handling errors so that less manual intervention is required
- prioritizing migrations
- grouping
- enhancing the reporting capabilities
- end-user control over migrations
The Start of the Journey - Enterprise Vault 10.0.4
Enterprise Vault 10 SP4 introduced the first wave of enhanced functionality for PST migrations to address some of these challenges that our customers face
1. Client Driven Migrations
Client driven PST migration is often the first migration method evaluated by customers as it gives an important advantage over all other types of migration as the owner of the PST files being migrated has already been derived – it is the user logged into the workstation. The identification of PST owners is a problem faced by all other PST migration mechanisms and so being able to easily determine this factor is a major advantage. An additional advantage of using this mechanism is that using the end user as the determining factor when trying to locate and migrate PST files makes location easier as that user will have access to all the places that they have stored PST files.
With client driven migration, the end-user can now submit PST files for migration from local or network path and specify the retention category. This is controlled by the PST Migration policy. The end-user is also able to view all the PSTs that are currently being migrated or have been migrated in the past, with this functionality all now easily accessible from a toolbar button and context menu in Outlook allowing instant interaction with the PST Migration UI.
2. Centralised Management
Client driven migrations were previously set and forget with no additional management possible. This enhancement fulfils the following management capabilities that are exposed in the VAC.Some of capabilities like filtering, sorting, grouping are introduced in EV 11 release.
- Ability to take an action like enable/disable client driven migration against one or more selected clients.
- View properties from context menu management capabilities in the VAC.
- Column based sorting.
- Add/remove columns
- Scaling the UI as well as the backend processes in presence of large number of objects (PST files, Computers, Mailboxes)
- Filtering, sorting and grouping capabilities.
3. Priority Based Migration
If there are multiple EV servers used for migration, it might happen that PSTs with a high priority are queued behind PSTs with lower level of priority and may take longer to migrate.
To overcome this limitation, we have introduced the concept of basic PST migration prioritisation so that long lists of PST files ready to migrate can be prioritised by a nominal value. This requirement requests that 6 levels of migration prioritisation are implemented as follows:
1 - Critical
2 - Important
3 - High
4 - Medium (default value)
5 - Low
6 - Lowest
Each prioritization level has a priority level higher than the ones below it. Any PST with a higher priority value will have priority and potentially be migrated sooner that those with lower values.
4. PST Locator Enhancements
Many of our customers want to use the PST locator to find a number of PST files located on specific file servers in their environment instead of thousands of client workstations. Some of our customers are aware that end users store PST files in one of two/three locations and they want to restrict PST location search only to these specific locations on each workstation.
So, this feature was introduced to reduce the dependency on the PST Locator Task for locating computers and PST files by allowing manual entry of computer(s) and PST(s). It will also reduce time taken for scanning computers by restricting which folders get scanned. Its core components are
- a UI provided for manual entry of single/multiple computers and single/multiple PST files via VAC and PowerShell.
- the ability to include/exclude folder paths that get scanned for locating PST files.
So that is 4 areas where we have enhanced out PST migration feature in EV10SP4/EV11 and really is just the start of this journey. I will share more about how we have continued the journey through the exciting PST enhancements that we have delivered in Enterprise Vault 11 like PST password override, advanced dashboard and reporting, and those that we are working hard on for future releases such as PST owner identification in Part 2 of this blog.