Symantec's Enterprise Vault system provides e-mail and file archiving, regulatory compliance and legal-discovery features suitable for the enterprise.

In this exclusive test of Symantec's latest release, EV 7.0, we found the product provides a very deep set of search and recovery tools that can tap into information archived from a wide variety of sources.

With support for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, as well as any SMTP connection, EV can work with any enterprise mail system. In addition, support for archiving other information repositories across the enterprise, including shared file systems and Microsoft SharePoint services, gives EV the ability to pull data from an even wider field.

EV is heavily linked into Microsoft Exchange clients, so we were also able to see benefits for users -- including automated message archiving and deletion -- tightly integrated into the Outlook e-mail client.

We did not test archiving performance but focused on the product's integration capabilities and its search and recovery features (see How we tested Enterprise Vault).

In our tests using Exchange 2007, we focused on e-mail applications as the most likely and interesting data stores for enterprise IT. EV talks to Exchange in two ways. First, it can link into the journaling capability of Exchange to get a copy of every message that passes through your mail system. In Exchange 2007, Microsoft requires that all messages go through a messaging hub (even if they are passed between users in the same message store) and then provides a way for third-party applications, such as EV, to get copies of those messages as they fly by. We turned on journaling for Exchange 2007 on the messaging hub and verified that messages sent using an Exchange 2007 server were captured by EV according to policy.

E-MAIL ARCHIVING SOFTWARE SYMANTEC ENTERPRISE VAULT V 7.0 Symantec

4.25

Price: Pricing starts at $40 per user, including one year of support. Pros: Comprehensive coverage of regulatory, discovery and archiving requirements for enterprise e-mail systems; accepts documents from other common information sources, including file servers and SharePoint servers; strong set of tools for search and recovery processes. Cons: Midmarket companies may find it difficult to scale down product for smaller deployments. The breakdown Product capabilities and features 35% 4.5 Scoring Key: 5: Exceptional 4: Very good 3: Average 2: Below average 1: Subpar or not available Management console and user interface 25% 4.5 Interoperability 10% 4 Scalability 20% 4 Documentation 10% 3.5 TOTAL SCORE 4.25 Check out our E-mail Archiving Buyer's Guide

Click to see: Results of EV test