For SysAds: Deploying Enterprise Vault

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in a related Tech Tip, I was recently charged with leading the rollout of Symantec's Enterprise Vault to all 4,210 Outlook users in my organization. One of the first things I noticed when taking on the project is that there doesn't seem to be a simple "how-to" guide for actually deploying Enterprise Vault to a base of active users. (At least not one I could find after spending some effort searching the internet.)

After much work, this is the procedure that we came up with.  Keep in mind that almost none of our users were running Cached Exchange Mode, a prerequisite for EV, prior to the rollout.  Here it is, for those of you who may be looking to roll out this system to your company or organization...

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How to Roll Out Symantec Enterprise Vault

1.
Make sure all of your clients have at least MS Office Service Pack 2 installed.

2.
Create two user-based group policy objects called “Enable Cached Exchange Mode” and “Disable AutoArchive”.

The first one should look like this.

Note that this GPO calls a login script.  You can find a version of this script here, including an excellent explanation of what it does and how to use it.

The second one should look like this.

Once you have these GPOs set up, apply them to your user accounts.

3.
Try to give as much time as possible between steps 2 and 3.  You need to ensure everyone gets the Enable Cached Exchange Mode policy before hitting them with the next policy.  (See Notes section below for more info on this.)

Once everyone is running Cached Exchange Mode, create a computer-based GPO called “Install EV 2007 Client Exts”.  It should look something like this.

Once it is set up , apply this GPO to the appropriate computers.

4.
Ensure Use mailbox store defaults is checked off under the "Exchange General" tab in Active Directory for each of your users.

If you have a lot of users with non-standard mailbox sizes, use this handy tool to make bulk changes.  I like it.  Actually, it's a nice tool for making all sorts of bulk changes to Active Directory objects.  But I have verified that it does work specifically for the "Use mailbox store defaults" switch.

Also, if you're unsure which of your users have non-standard mailbox limits, here's a handy script we found.  According to its author, it "lists all mailboxes that have their limits changed to bypass store defaults (mDBUseDefaults=FALSE), and lists the 3 attributes above if present."

5.
After all the client extensions are installed, add the user to the security group set up in Active Directory specifically for your Enterprise Vault users.  (You would have created this security group when you first installed EV on your Exchange server.)  This lets the message server know that this user needs to be “vaulted”. The account will get added to EV sometime in the next 24 hours, depending on what you specified in your EV installation.


Notes 

• If any clients aren't on Cached Mode when you install the Outlook Client Extension on them, their Outlook will stop working. They will get an error message when starting up Outlook, then the application will close. If this happens, you will have to manually set up Cached Mode for them to fix the problem: go to Control Panel, select Mail, click on E-mail Accounts, click Next >>, click Change..., and select Cached Exchange Mode.
• Make sure your users know they can’t use the Archive feature of Outlook anymore. AutoArchive will now be shut off, but if they try to manually archive messages that are already archived by EV, they will be unable to open those messages.