Everyone thinks it is a bit of a pain having to logon to their EV server in order to read the event logs, to find out some information.  You can of course, read the event logs remotely, and here I’ll describe how.

Grab the DLL

You have to grab the DLL VaultMessages.DLL from the Enterprise Vault server.  These do vary from version to version of EV, so it’s best to get the one of your EV server, and make a note to replace it when you upgrade to the next service pack, or version.

Store the DLL on your client machine

I have a folder called EventLogDLLs that I pop the Enterprise Vault DLL in (and others).  You can do the same sort of thing

Register the DLL

You have to register the DLL using :-

regsvr32 vaultmessages.dll

Try it out

On your EV Server open the event log, and save out the application event log, and...

One of the things that Enterprise Vault allows you to create is Shared Archives.  These don't have a mailbox associated with them, and don't have a folder structure, ie they are "flat" or "unstructured" (some people will remember this was the case in the early days of EV with mailbox archives).

I'm curious if people use them extensively, or for specific purposes.  Do you use them?

One of the ways of creating these archives is to use EVPM, but you can also create them directly in the VAC.  You can use either method to give people permission to items in the archive, and like a regular archive you can choose whether those permissions are read/write/etc.

In case you missed it, Mediterranean Shipping has implemented Enterprise Vault to archive Exchange and SharePoint after having difficulties with EMC EmailXtender. 

Mediterranean , the worlds second-largest container ship operator with 35,000 employees and 400 vessels across the globe, has implemented SharePoint to improve collaboration among their employees across all of its office locations.  "Our SharePoint  is something that's relatively new and growing by about a terabyte every year," Fabio Cattasi, chief technology officer for Mediterranean Shipping explains. "Unfortunately not all of our communcations come in by email.  We still get faxes, and those have to be scanned and saved as images into SharePoint."

"The level of growth in SharePoint is much greater than Exchange, as we have SharePoint libraries with hundreds of thousands of documents inside," adds Sergio Fedelini,...

Prior to Enterprise Vault 8 Service Pack 4 if you installed (or tried to install) the VAC and the EV Outlook Add-in on the same machine you could get into all sorts of issues whereby one or the other wouldn't work, and upgrading one or the other was nearly impossible.

EV 8 SP 4 changes this.  It is now supported to have them both installed on a client machine.