From time to time Enterprise Vault administrator may wish to change the content of shortcuts that are built by the system once an email has been archived. I don't think it's something that happens 'all too often' because it's possible to test out quite well in a lab environment what a resulting shortcut will look like depending how you have configured it. But .. sometimes there is a need to change the policy. In this blog I'll explain the way to make the change, and what to look out for.
The shortcut policy is shown below:
You can see how it's made up of a number of different components and features to make the resulting shortcut look like, well, a shortcut, rather than the original item. There is even the option to keep the full message body, but then you're not going to get any real space savings when using Enterprise Vault in that manner -- your mobile device users might love you more though, because it will mean that they can see the whole of all items, archived or not.
When a change is made to these settings the next time the archiving agent runs, newly archived items will take on the policy which has been defined.
That's great - but - items archived in the past will be following the old policy though. Once they've been written, they are then stuck like that. In order to change them an administrator can implement a registry key called 'RestoreShortcutBody':
1. On the Enterprise Vault server, open the Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to the following key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WoW6432Node\KVS\Enterprise Vault\Agents
3. Create a new DWORD with the name RestoreShortcutBody and a value of 1.
4. Restart the Enterprise Vault Admin Service.
5. Open the Vault Administration Console, right-click on the Mailbox Archiving Task and select Run Now.
6. Under Run Mode, if you are running EV8 and above select Shortcut Processing. (Choose Report if you are running a version below EV8)
The archiving task will then go through and rewrite all the *existing* shortcuts. It won't recreate any that have been deleted by users. One thing to note when this is running is that you can monitor it's progress by creating a Search Folder in Outlook which has Message Class as it's filter.. then view that search folder, and look for Modified Date. I also think it is a great idea in a large environment to process these sorts of updates in batches. So rather than doing a shortcut processing run on ALL mailboxes in the entire environment do it on a batch of users. This sort of activity is also good to fill up a weekend, when the systems may be less busy. Users don't need to be connected, because the activity is taking place directly against the Exchange Server.
Have you ever used the RestoreShortcutBody registry key to rewrite shortcuts? Let me know in the comments below: