In the last blog post I showed how Enterprise Vault integrates in to Exchange 2003 OWA.  This blog post covers the integration with Exchange 2007 OWA.

The integration is simplified since the component that needs installing is only installed on the Client Access Server (CAS).  You don’t install anything on servers hosting just a mailbox role.  This is what the main page looks like:

Retrieval is nice and simple, a double click on an archived item will cause the item to be retrieved and displayed like this example:

You can archive and restore items.  Restoring an item shows you a dialog like this:

...

Yes it's still there lurking in the background!  Some people do still use Exchange 2003, and users 'fight' with Outlook Web Access.  Enterprise Vault has for many years integrated in to the OWA experience, with the addition of an installable component on the Exchange Back-End server, and on the Front-End server (if one is deployed).   Below I'll show you how end users see Enterprise Vault in OWA:

Here is a sample mailbox that I have been using for some time:

You can see a number of things in the screenshot, for example:

* Indicator in the preview pane that this is an archived item.

* Icon the message in the list of messages-in-the-folder is the familiar shortcut icon.

* There are links at the bottom of the toolbar for 'integrated search' and '...

Many people in the Enterprise Vault administration world have heard of an MDC file.  Not everyone knows what it is though..  or what it looks like.  Below I’ll explain and show you.

The MDC file is the Metadata Cache file.  It contains mail messages, these resemble your archived items, but they’re not ‘quite’ the same.  Essentially the folder structure will follow the structure of your archive, and the mails are actually stubs, containing only some of the message metadata, and a short snippet of the message body (no attachments etc).  Another way to look at it is that is your Virtual Vault.  Obviously the Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-in has lots of code in it which manipulates these items, and presents them to you in such a way that they can seamlessly be your ‘full’ archived items, metadata, attachments and all.

The screenshot below shows you an example of the file...

One of the common questions when it comes to archiving of Exchange messages with Enterprise Vault is which date attribute is used when searching ..  well the answer is in the following technote:

TECH198491

Hope that proves helpful to you.