Enterprise Vault Recovery Case StudyAfter a failed EV project:
every shortcut found.

Organisation

Magic Circle law firm (name withheld)

Sector

Legal · London HQ, global offices

Source

EV shortcuts in DMS, MSG files and PSTs

Destination

Secured area of Enterprise Vault

Scale

2 TB

Result

Access restored · destruction fully automated

The situation

Years earlier, the firm had upgraded Enterprise Vault using a competitor's software, and the upgrade had failed. The aftermath was still causing problems. Shortcuts across the business pointed at the old EV installation. Many weren't even in mailboxes: lawyers had filed emails into the firm's document management system (DMS), so shortcuts lived there as raw MSG files and inside PSTs.

Worse, the failed project had broken the firm's data destruction process, which could no longer remove source messages from Enterprise Vault on schedule. For a law firm, keeping data past its destruction date is a real risk, so access to Enterprise Vault had to be restricted. That left a large number of users unable to reach their own archived mail.

The firm needed every shortcut, wherever it lived, rehydrated and its original deleted from Enterprise Vault, automatically.

How the project ran

1. Customise first. The platform was extended to handle the firm's specific mix of shortcut locations before any data was touched.
2. Discover inside the DMS. Discovery found the location, size and number of shortcuts in the DMS, and separated those pointing at the current Enterprise Vault from those pointing at the old servers.
3. Uncover the root cause. Discovery also showed that the destruction procedure had been moving items into PST files stored in the DMS, and some of those PSTs were corrupt and couldn't be opened. The scope was widened and the destruction process was redesigned so it no longer depended on PSTs.
4. Rehydrate and secure. Messages in the DMS were rehydrated where needed, moved into a secured area of Enterprise Vault, and the original EV instances deleted.

Results

• 2 TB of data brought back under control
• Shortcuts in the DMS, MSG files and PSTs resolved, including those pointing at retired servers
• Enterprise Vault access restored for the firm's users
• Data destruction moved from a manual process to a fully automated one
• Problems left by the previous vendor fixed, along with others found along the way

What this means for your project

Enterprise Vault shortcuts don't only live in mailboxes. In legal and professional services they turn up in document management systems, file shares and PSTs, and a migration that only scans Exchange will miss them. Discovery across every location, before you plan, is what stops a migration becoming next year's recovery project.

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