Hi MoJoe,

Basically as you know when a calender item gets archived it is not a "true" shortcut (IPM.NOTE.EnterpriseVault.Shortcut). Therefore the Calendar Items that where archived never expired like they should.

The information you have been provided is correct.  I would say this should be normal behavior.  I think this went in with the up-datable meta data changes, but will see if I can find out if it was documented some ware.

As for your last comment, essentially what you are asking for would be an enhancement, as the product now works as expected.

--wayne

Wayne,
I beg to differ with you, the product is no longer working as expected.  For the past year we had been able to archive calendar items without havng them disappear from the users calendar.  Technical articles like the one I cited above confirmed that "Enterprise Vault does not delete the original calendar item from Microsoft Exchange."  We based our calendar archiving strategy on this documented fact.

I would say that EV 8.0 SP2 is not exhibiting normal behavior since as you say, "when a calendar item gets archived it is not a "true" shortcut".  If It is not a shortcut, and it isn't, then it should not be delete by shortcut deletion!

I concede that the new behavior exhibited in EV 8.0 SP2 that allows for deleting of calendar items via shortcut deletion after they had been archived may be a good enhancement for those that wish to use it.  However the "enhancement" was poorly done in that it did not allow the customer to continue to use the products previously documented behavior and there was no documentation on the change in that behavior.

What I am asking for is not an "enhancement", as you term it, but a fix.  Symantec needs to fix a change they've made to the product because they've broken the previously documented behavior.  However, if Symantec and everyone else wants to call my request for an enhancement then I will strongly request an enhancement in every location I can find.  Where do I go?  Whom do I need to speak with?  Is there a product manager?  Is there a phone number?  Do I need to get my boss to lean on the salesman?  How about all of the above?  I just need to be able to get back to where I was a year ago and make my customers happy again.

Perhaps Symantec should put a disclaimer at the beginning of all of the Release notes that says:

EVERYONE BEWARE OF FURTHER UNDOCUMENTED AND LOGIC ALTERING "ENHANCEMENTS" AND "FIXES" TO THIS PRODUCT THAT MAY CAUSE YOU TO SPEND MUCH TIME CHANGING YOUR DESIGN AND RETOOL YOUR CONFIGURATION AND PROCEDURES.  LOSS OF DATA PROBABLY WILL NOT OCCUR, HOWEVER THE DATA MAY BE DIFFICULT TO FIND AND NOT BE PRESENTED IN A FORMAT THAT IS USABLE BY THE CONSUMER. 

Thanks, MoJoe

MoJoe,

I'm not disagreeing that it was poorly communicated, however that was really a "issue" that you used as you did.  I totally agree with you that it should have been communicated differently.  I have gone through all the documentation from all the releases and cannot find any communication out. 

What should have been done is keep the old behavior default for old installs, and new installs this be the default. Older installs should have an option to switch this on.

So please don't shoot me ;) all I am saying is this is how it should be. Not saying you should use it this way, and also totally agreeing with you that it should have been communicated better.

--wayne

MoJoe,
Yes there are Product Managers and Regional Product Managers you can speak to about this.  You should request this via your sales person. (I know as I used to be a Regional Product Manager and worked with customers directly around features and futures of the products.)

There is an Ideas section on this forum for you to post request.

regards,
Tony

I'm in the same boat as MoJoe and the archive tools suck for calendar items. So how do we unarchive calendar appointments?

Brian,
Thanks for sharing my pain.

What we did to stop the bleeding was to turn off shortcut deletion.  That kept EV from removing anymore calendar items while we come up with a strategy.  You can then have any users that need the archived calendar items restore them from the vault.  Keep in mind the calendar items in the vault show the modified date and not the date the item is to occur.

We can't let our Exchange mailboxes continue to grow with shortcuts. So what we will do until Symantec "enhances" or "fixes" the product is either stop archiving calendar items and turn shortcut deletion back on OR  use EVPM to change the archiving and shortcut deletion policy for all Calendar folders and turn shortcut deletion back on.

The problem with the EVPM solution is that we'll need more policies and we'll need to run the EVPM daily to catch any newly enabled mailboxes.

Regards,
MoJoe

Tony,
Thank you.  We will be getting in touch with product manager via our salesman to discuss this matter further.

Wayne,
Sorry for being so hard on you.  I was looking for an outlet for my frustrations with Symantec disregard for its customers and this forum was it.  Tony has pointed me to the right person or persons to chew on a little.

Thanks,
MoJoe

HAHA, I feel sorry for someone ;p

Just disable Archiving of calender items, that's going to be the safest and easiest bet IMHO.

--wayne

Hi MoJoe I am running into the same problem. I have a little pull so I will see what I can do. As a work around you can turn on Managed Folders in Exchange and delete calendar items after a specific date.

1x,
Thanks for the suggestion. We thought about that also.  The only problem is that we are still at Exchange 2003 and just now moving to Exchange 2007.

Thanks, MoJoe

Hi,

Apologies if this change in V8 has come as a surprise so thought I'd give some backgound

In V7, we improved the archiving of calendar items by not making turning them inot shortcuts.  We found that keeping the original item albeit with attachments removed improvied inter-operability with Outlook.  However as noted, a 'defect' as we say this, was that then shortcut expiry did not apply to such items.  As far as we were concerned we felt this was a bug.  At the end of the day this is an archived item and therefore old, it was only not a shortcut due to interop issues.  We saw customers who's mailboxes were larger than they ought to be because these archived calendar items would stay in a users mailbox forever which to us as a mailbox management product felt wrong. 

It appears that a tech note is now incorrect and needs correcting and we will look into that.  I will also look to see what we can do about documenting this changed behaviour in the documentation.  I am not even sure the product documentation even mentioned the original calendar archiving.

May I ask a question.  What is the use case that you don't want shortcut expiry to apply to these items given that over time the mailbox will be confused by more and more of these items..That would help me to see where you are coming from with this request so to speak.  As suggested please seek your account manager or the ideas system on SymConnect.

Yours,

Mike Bilsborough
Director, EV Engineering

in terms of viewing calendar items i believe that the new virtual vault feature in V8 sp3 is much better in this area.

I do not have an exact date but it is due out either this month or next last i heard.  As for what it looks like, I participated in the beta and can say it worked great and I absolutey love it!  The calendar behaved like i would expect as far as showing the calendar items on the correct day etc.. 

Here is a screen shot of how mine looks, I actually just manually archived those items and to get them to show up for the screen shot. 

Does anyone know if the ' new'  feature of expiring shortcuts might have an effect on calendaritems showing in BlackBerry's ?

investigating an issue that started occurring after applying 8SP2. There is no co-incidence in IT.

EV Director,
You asked for "the use case that you don't want shortcut expiry to apply to these items given that over time the mailbox will be confused by more and more of these items..".  Since I started this string, I'll try to answer...

Our users view calendar items to determine when events occurred in projects, cases, and their other daily tasks.  They must look farther back than the 30 days we have set for mailbox archiving or the 90 days we have set for "shortcut" expiration.  Since the Archive Explorer view of archived calendar items is based on the modified date it it useless to our users.

We also need to archive calendar items for use in Discovery Accelerator.  Journaling does not capture calendar items in a users mailbox.

Before you fixed the "defect" in calendar archiving, we could archive calendar items without them being deleted after the shortcut deletion period.  This allowed our users to view historical calendar items for their daily job duties and we had a copy of calendar items for use with Discovery Accelerator.  Users could manage old calendar items via Outlook archiving or departments could manage calendar items via Exchange System Manager.

We assumed that since there was a tech note stating that calendar items would not be deleted and should be managed via Exchange and Outlook and there was no other documentation stating otherwise, that we were correctly using Enterprise Vault for archiving calendar items.

As you found when you had to handle calendar items differently in EV V7, they are not the same type of data as mail items.  Therefore, they should be handled differently.

If "virtual vault" allows the user to view of historical calendar items in a format similar to Outlook calendar view then it might be a solution.  Does "virtual vault" require vault cache be implemented?  Does it work with OWA or does it require Outlook client?  If it requires vault cache or does not work with OWA then it is not a solution and another must be found.

Regards,
MoJoe 

From what I understand, Virtual Vault is the "new" Vault Cache which requires Outlook to be in cached mode. I don't see how you could access this from OWA.

If virtual vault only works with the office client and outlook cache mode then I still need a solution that treats calendar items as they were treated in the version prior to 8.0.

Hi,

Glad you raised the issue and so we were able to just about to get it into sp3.

Mike