As part of my open offer to anyone that wishes to gain some information about KVS that perhaps the sales people don’t tell you I have had another question about the product.

A gentleman called Naser has posted the following comment:

Hi Andy, i am looking for any solution that eleminate PST files. so my qestion is for KVS: Is it easy in deployment and management? does it support OWA so that users can access archived items through OWA? also do you recommend any other solutions do the same like KVS?

KVS does indeed provide support for the migration of PST into a users vault store. Although in saying that, it could be easier to manage.

In essence, when Enterprise vault (version 6) is configured a scan of all the P.Cs in your domain is performed, and they are populated into KVS.

The idea behind this is that you can schedule a task (called the PST locator task) that checks the MAPI profile on each machine and then sucks any PST that it finds up to the KVS server and then copies the PST data to the KVS server (called the PST import) into the Vault of the MAPI profile owner (called the migrator task).

Sounds good doesn’t it? – well, yes and no – you see, the customer cannot be in Outlook when the copy exercise occurs (as Outlook places a file lock on the PST file) – therefore you either do it after hours (where most machines are closed down anyway – therefore you cannot access the PST if it on the local drive), or you need to schedule each PST migration (pain in the backside).

Another point on note is that in order to scan the MAPI profiles on the machine the service account that the PST migrator task runs under must have permissions on the machine, and also permissions to access the area where the PST file in the MAPI profile is stored – bummer as you could be looking to run the first two tasks under a domain admin account -or- have the Vault services account a member of the domain admin group (which is not recommended).

Also, this will also miss orphan PSTs that are not attached to MAPI profiles.

In terms of is it easy to deploy and manage, I would say that consultancy is essential in the deployment of KVS as it does have some interesting features during the installation, however one huge plus for the product is that once it is in a working it is truly excellent and simple to use.

Another big plus point is that its support for OWA is brilliant, it integrates fully and allows for archiving of items and searching of the Vault – and if you operate a Front-End / Back-End scenario then the best part is that you do not have to open any additional ports as a small proxy component is installed on the Front-End and Back-End Servers and it works a treat.

There are a number of other products out there that do similar things to KVS, for example GFI, IBM and OpenText.

The GFI product is pretty good from what I hear, cheaper than KVS and is good for smaller installations, the IBM offering IMHO looked terrible – and OpenText are about to enter the arena of Mail Archival to bolster their document management product.

I found when doing my tender evaluation KVS when using Exchange still had the nose for a product that is simple to use, integrates well with Exchange and complies with a number of legal statutes.