It is not linked to a specific hardware component and can be installed on any platform. It is a perfect solution for basically all companies and the user experience is simple and easy to use. Another positive point is that it has become the best solution for archiving emails and secret documents. The points of attention revolve around the cost for companies with many users. If there is no planning, it can become a major cost.
Intradyn works well for a small to medium business like ours that just needs to keep an archive of every email sent or received throughout our organization. It's easy to search for emails, whether you're looking for keywords, sender, recipient, subject, body, header, etc. The Outlook plugin works well for end users.
EV FSA had 2 stubbing options. We ended up using the IE shortcut as the stub replacement on the file system. In the DFS environment using DFSR the IE shortcuts allowed us to quickly and easily archive the data while allowing users to still access their data via the web or stub format. We were also able to exclude certain folders from archiving like the dfsrprivate folder. The newer versions of EV 11 and up have a better user interface to access this content from the web.
EV SharePoint implementation was pretty simple for us. Document Library archiving was pretty seamless. Archiving the different versions in sharepoint also helped further reduce total cost of storage.
EV Exchange was a good addition to our archiving portfolio. In our case we did not use the stubbing mechanism. Instead, we used the vault cache methodology. We had the option to pull down the full archive versus just the header information. The concern at the time was how quickly we could update the vault cache on the client. We ended up scaling out our EV environment to ensure the push of data could get to all our clients since we were in the middle of a notes to exchange migration. Overall I was impressed with Vault Cache and its capabilities. I also liked the ability to manage the Vault Cache and perform resets where necessary from the web browser interface.
We had EV FSA, SharePoint and Exchange as one single environment so we benefited from overall single instances of a file. Our backend systems were Netapp which we enabled deduplication for further improve storage savings. EV had a good SQL Reporting mechanism for Archiving and plenty of good canned reports.
Outlook plugin is great, but I wish it could somehow update user passwords when users change them via Active Directory. In our environment, users have to change their AD passwords every 45 days, but the Outlook plugin doesn't capture the change, so the next time the user tries to search the archive via the plugin, the plugin doesn't work. Since our users aren't accessing the archive that often, they easily forget that they've changed their password since they last accessed the archive and need support.
Symantec Enterprise is one of the best in the industry. We have already deployed their product to thousands of devices in the company and it would be a huge project to go through and change to an alternative product. We have also had much luck in dealing with their customer support. They have been very pleasant to deal with and their technical support has been quite knowledgeable in fixing our issues. This leaves us with very little reason to switch to a new product. We would have to see a significant amount of cost savings to switch to an alternative that offers all the same features and modules.
Using Enterprise Vault means having a system that is not directly integrated in your backups, and not tied to the upgrade kadence of your backup systems is nice. With CommVault or other backup driven software the upgrade cycle and user experience is not always tied to the desktop products so users can be left using older versions. In addition, CommVault and other backup based software often does not have good litigation hold and search tools.
