I recently blogged about a recent project that I completed which involved the installation and configuration of Symantic KVS vault, and in the post I offered to explain some of my experiences about the product based upon questions that readers of my blog (and participants in the MSExchange.org forums) could ask.

I have (so far) received two questions – the first of which is from a chap called Jonathan.D I will deal with here (as best I can).

I need to point out that the following is based upon my experiences of the product, and is based upon the installation that we have where I currently work – it may not reflect the true functionality of KVS. It is also important to point out that I am currently only making use of the archiving for Exchange, not Sharepoint nor File systems.

Anyway Jonathan D posted the following;

im interested in the workflow capabilities for kvs, what do u see with respect to ilm capabilities – ive talked to a number of kvs reps and cant get a straight answer – for example, i archive a message; based on an AD attribute i assign a category, like HUMANRESOURCES, now within the system i should be able to say HUMANRESOURCES has a 2 year retention. thats the simple part i believe. for the business workflow, what im trying to determine is after two years is the workflow adjustable so i can extend the process flow to something like; if CATEGORY = HUMANRESOURCES requires approval by X,Y and Z for deletion, where the system now waits for authorization’s from X,Y and Z before deleting. also another answer i cant seem to get is is the deletion at the message level of can only groups of messages, i think they call them containers be deleted at a time. also, does the KVS system natively manage the storage policies based on workflows, so that after year 1 i can migrate the HUMANERSOURCES emails from tier1 to tier2 storage for example or does that need to happen with a different HSM software and using their policy engine for the migrates. appreciate the posts. this is great stuff.

Firstly I would like to thank John D for the question, and secondly I would like to point that I think that it is a great product.

Within KVS you can configure a number of retention categories (there are three defaults) which govern how long an item of mail will be kept for – you can set this as a default at Vault (or Site) level or you can override the default for individual users (it is easier to decided upon a retention category default for all users rather than multiples). Within a retention category you can configure of a user can delete items or not, but you cannot grant access to the deletion button on a per users basis – the minute you enable it all users in the retention category that can delete will have the ability to do so. You can assign retention categories (how long stuff is kept, if you can delete) and archive policies (this is how long should KVS wait until an item in a users mailbox is archived, what should be done with the original item in Exchange etc) by Organizational unit in AD – however I have not seen away in which it can be done by other AD attributes (for example Group Membership or extended attribute).

I do not believe that you can implement a tiered system of approval for deletion before a message can be removed from the Vault.

The thing that I found about the product is that if you keep your initial configuration as simple as possible and establish all of you “retention standards” and “Archival Standards” before you install the management of the installation is very straight forward.

In terms of multi tier for workflow for the software, I know that if you are using IBM TSM you can certainly implement a tiered infrastructure to your vaulting (for example backing stuff off to tape from disk after 8 months) – our configuration initially allows data to sit in the vault on DS8100 disk for 4 months where it is then passed off to FASTT at 6 months and then to tape at 9 months.

Jonathan – I hope that helps and if you have anything further please comment and I will reply.

Another comment that I received was from Matt Giampappa whom asked;

Any thoughts on Outlook 2007 and the EV Client Tools? I had decent success with them under Outlook 2k7 Beta 2, but the 6.0 SP3 tools dont appear to work with the RTM Outlook 2k7.

Hiya Matt, I am currently using KVS 6 with SP3 with the RTM of Outlook 2007 and it works great. However I have found that on some machines the plugins do not quite work as expected – I have found that this is normally to do with Outlook being upgraded from a previous version.

The official line from Symantec is that Outlook 2007 is “being tested” therefore not supported, but generally it works great for me.

I have also found that the host machine needs to be a member of the domain that KVS is in, and logged in with a domain account.

I trust, and hope that this helps, and if anyone else has any questions that they would like to ask – please post them and I will try to help.

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