For the first time the other day I upgraded a production Discovery Accelerator installation from EV 9 to EV 10.0.1.  I noticed a small oddity, and wondered 'Why?'.  The oddity is that you can only upgrade to DA 10.0.1 if you are running DA 9.0.3, so not DA 9, DA 9.0.1, or DA 9.0.4.

I thought that was a little odd - it is covered in the upgrade instructions which is great, but it meant another half an hour or so of upgrading the EV binaries, then the DA binaries, a reboot, and then the same process again to get us up to DA 10.0.1.

Whether your are an architect,engineer,admin or a general IT Manager, you will almost certainly have had the need to document or making drawings of your Enterprise Vault environment. This might be to explain EV to other colleagues in your organisation or just to make things clearer to yourself, we all a know a picture is worth a thousand words and of course a pictorial view of anything can sometimes be easier to understand. To this end my colleagues in our Technical Enablement team have been working hard to produce a number of diagrams which I am sure you'll find of use, so many thanks to Dan Strydom for his tireless efforts in getting so many drawings completed. The following link is now in my list of very useful information and I'm sure if you're involved with Enterprise Vault in anyway you will find them a most useful addition to your toolkit.

The diagrams show many aspects...

It seems like only a few weeks ago when Symantec re-released Enterprise Vault 9.0.4 (and it became Enterprise Vault 9.0.4 R1) and now there is a Cumulative Client kit available from this technote:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH193522

It is available in all the usual languages (like the normal  media kit).  

One of my areas of responsibility is the EV Outlook addin install, and a common subject I'm asked about is reboots. In this post, I'll explain a little about why reboots are sometimes required, how Windows Installer (the technology the Outlook Addin install uses) deals with this, and how we recommend you roll out the Outlook addin.

Why do installs need reboots?

The most common reason an install might need to ask for a system reboot is because it needs to replace a file which is in use by another application on the system. As a simple example, suppose have the EV Outlook addin installed, and Outlook is running. At that point, Outlook would have loaded Valkyrie.dll (which contains much of the client logic that makes the addin work) and locked the file. File locking is an intrinsic feature of the Windows file system designed to prevent critical files being changed while applications are in the middle of some (possibly sensitive) operation....