Score: 4.75 out of 5
Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, see a full rundown of how it fared in our testing.

What Enterprise Vault offers is not so much features that the other products don't have, but a mature and well-thought-out interface that makes it easier to access and use all the features it does have. It also offers a degree of scalability, flexibility of policies, granularity of control and breadth of features that are as good as it gets. The 8.0 version -- is due to be generally available early in 2009 – should only add to the product's maturity.

Symantec's Enterprise Vault is a capable and scalable program that uses Microsoft SQL server as well as a variety of other Microsoft add-ons for Server 2000/2003/2008, including ASP.NET, message queuing services, IIS with ASP, Outlook 2003 with CDO option, MDAC and .Net Framework 1.1 and 2.0.

The installation instructions for the prerequisites are 29 pages. This is one of the packages where you'll really want to take advantage of the installation support included in the purchase price. However, after all the various prerequisites are installed and configured, all the necessary accounts DNS entries have been made, the Active Directory configuration has been done accounts have been created and configured, the registry entries have been changed, the actual application is very usable and quite friendly.

The product's architecture is extremely flexible and scalable – using the enterprise version of SQL server, it can support very large installations with multiple Exchange server and thousands of e-mail accounts. It features excellent reporting tools, a wide variety of options for document retention, and flexible search tools for e-discovery that support a variety of granular permissions for auditors in various roles and across one or multiple domains.

The system supports archiving on IBM Domino servers, SMTP servers, SharePoint servers and even file servers, providing the ability to archive multiple versions of documents of servers, not as a replacement for back and restore software, but for discovery and change management processes. While an Outlook plug-in is available, it is not necessary – forms are available that provide support for viewing and retrieving archived e-mail through either Outlook or the Outlook Web Access client that don't require the plug-in. PST files can be imported into the archive, enabling the consolidation of local mailbox archives.