New Plugin Reuqest: Symantec Enterprise Vault

[jsam]

A common software stack in professional services business includes Outlook/Exchange for email and Interwoven for document management. What's missing is a plugin for an email archiving solution; and the 800 lb gorilla is Symantec Enterprise Vault (was KVS), http://www.symantec.com/Products/enterprise?c=prodinfo&refId=322.

Are there any plans to build this? That would be a real coup.

John

[Kenward]

Can you translate that out of Nerd into something like English?

Or is this message meant solely for the X1 team?

[jsam]

Is this post meant for X1? Yes. The board is entitled "Feature Requests and Gripes". This post is one of the former.

Professional services businesses are different. They're often organised as practices: a few to hundreds of peers who all jointly own the firm (often believing they solely own it. The owners are expert practitioners: architects, lawyers, accountants. They bill for their time.

For the purpose of this forum, the critical thing is that they produce large documents and email them around.

Focusing on the legal world, they'll use a variety of software tools. But, strip it all back, and they write enormous tomes in Word (often now in colour, with diagrams and photographs). And they write millions of them. Andy they email them. This is the land of the 1GB email (no, I'm not kidding).

To do this, their PC will have Microsoft Outlook as the email client. In a corporate environment, they'll probably store most of their email away from their PC - on a set of servers running Microsoft Exchange. X1 can cheerfully search both local Outlook email and Exchange based email. Good.

Lawyers create documents in teams. So storing master copies on local hard drives is out. With millions, storing them in shares on servers is ok for a while. But most now use document management systems. Arguably the most pervasive document management product in legal is Interwoven'w Worksite. X1 supports this.

So, what is X1 "missing"? Going back to emails, Keeping track of large volumes of large emails is tough. You won't want to keep increasing the size of people's mailboxes. Microsoft don't really recommend going over 1GB per person. For other reasons (eg BlackBerry use, complliance) you may want to run signigicantly lower. Many businesses enforce 5 or 10MB limits; law firms run much larger (often into the multi-GB arena). So, archiving solutions (oft bigged-up to information lifecycle management solutions) are in use. Again, arguably the most common is what was KVS and is now Symantec's Enterprise Vault.

So, it would very useful if X1 could search the archival repository. At this point it can't - but if it did it could be a killer app in legal. Seriously. And that was the key question.

To round this out, the legal world has other repositories that would be handy to search as well. For time-recording and billing Aderant's CMS or Thomson's Elite. For customer management, Interface's Interaction. A lot of legal intranets are using Sharepoint for presentation - so an X1 webpart would be very nice. X1 on a BlackBerry, now lawyers start salivating.

John

ps does calling someone a nerd, when you post your own tech specs, really help anyone?

[Kenward]

I'm beginning to get the idea, but I am a simple soul who needs things spelled out in English. The original message baffled me completely.

The link you provided may have been fine for IT support, but they are notorious for using deliberately obscure language to make themselves look smart in the eyes of their victims. I found a, for me, better description [url]http://www.veritas.com/news/press/PressReleaseDetail.jhtml?NewsId=64405]here in this press release[/url]. They have to dumb down for journalists, which just happens to be my own profession.

The release talks of this stuff as "e-mail and content archiving software" which makes sense for X1 to eat.

It goes on to say:

Enterprise Vault 6.0 introduces a new PST sniffer that can locate PST files anywhere on a corporate network. The Exchange administrator can consolidate, compress and manage PSTs centrally, leaving placeholders so the users never notice. This centralized management of PSTs helps ensure data is not accidentally lost or deleted, makes these records instantly available enterprise-wide and simplifies Exchange upgrade or migration processes.

So definitely one for X1 to address. And in keeping with the increasing emphasis on the corporate model.

The signature is there to encourage folks with problems to provide similar information. Troubleshooting can be much easier if you know what the victim has in the way of a computer system.

PS As the originator of the message, you may be the only one who can correct the spelling error in the subject. Or is that too nerdy of me?