Enterprise Vault Outlook Download
How To Access Outlook Vault
How To Add Enterprise Vault In Outlook 2013

Solution – Add Below registry on the Client Machine. Below is for Outlook 2016. 14.0 – Outlook 2010. 15.0 – Outlook 2013. 16.0 – Outlook 2016. The enterprise vault is where your archived emails are stored. Every user has a virtual vault attached to their mailbox that can only be accessed by that user. 46 days after you receive/send an email it will vault and move to your virtual vault folder (See “Where is my Virtual Vault” section below).

“Holy crap!”, stated a customer as I was demonstrating one of our products. I wasn’t sure if he thought a feature I was showing him was a horrible idea or a great one!

Mass Restore Solution

Customers from different industries, can have completely different requirements of a product. In this case, I was showing him an Outlook Add-in that can be used in a unique way to do a mass restore of Enterprise Vault archived items back to folders in an Exchange mailbox.

Quite a few law firms around the world use Enterprise Vault. Many of them also use a document management system to manage retention, such as NetDocuments ndMail or iManage Work. They typically have a way within Outlook, to push information from their mailbox into the document repository. One of the problems if they have mailbox management with Enterprise Vault, is that a lot of the messages they want to put into the document management system could be in the form of Enterprise Vault ‘stubs’, aka ‘short-cuts’. These stubs are not the full message and they never include the attachments. To resolve this issue, they will typically instruct their users to ‘restore’ the items from Enterprise Vault before putting them in the document management system. In Enterprise Vault, they can do that with a (non-magical) button in Outlook that looks like this:

There are two problems with this:

1) If there are a lot of messages in the folder/subfolders of a case, it can be very tedious to restore all the items.

2) Restoring the items leaves a copy in Enterprise Vault. Some law firms don’t want multiple copies of important messages. They want the document management system to be the system of record. If the document becomes expired there, they don’t want another copy to exist elsewhere (in Enterprise Vault, for example).

Problem Solved

So, we came up with an Outlook Add-in which solves these two problems. It looks like this:

Press it, and you get the option to restore all short-cuts in the current folder and its subfolders, as shown in this animated GIF:

Magic Button

We have a customer that has been using this button for over 9 years. They coined it the ‘Magic Button’ because it saves their attorneys so much time. It is crucial for them. If anything goes wrong (issues with updates to Enterprise Vault, etc.) we hear about it fast.

So, when I told this potential new customer that pressing the button would restore all items in the folder and subfolder, potentially thousands of items, he said “holy crap!”. My first thought was that he was concerned it would fill up the user’s mailbox. That was not the case. He was excited because he had been looking all over for a tool that would do this. This made my day and I realized we need to do a better job of getting the word out about this seemingly simple product that makes people’s daily tasks much easier. Hence this blog post!

… that moment, when in the cloud – in a real one; i.e.: in a plane somewhere over an ocean – and you eventually got nothing else to do than reading those loads of docs you dropped into your mailbox for later use … that – very – moment … when your enterprise’s archiver kicks in and Outlook tells you it can’t load your eMail as you are – guess what? – OFFLINE!

Here’s what I did.

Why?

Pokemon diamond rare bone. Enterprise Vault is a great archiving solution. It integrates pretty seamlessly with Outlook. You don’t realize any difference in accessing eMails whether they’re meanwhile archived or not. There’s however a difference: Once Vault has gotten hold of one of your eMails, all you really have in your folders is in essence a torso of 300 chars embedded with a link to the respective Vault item of your eMail.

And now, there’s those occasions when you want to access exactly those old eMails that Vault has long ago grasped; also when offline; and – honestly: PST is not such a bad concept (while I indeed do appreciate companies’ aim to reduce (restrict) PST usage). Anyway. I spent some thought around this recently and ultimately created a solution which works perfectly for me and now lets me access all my old mail again – through a PST folder.

This one’s to explain how that solution works:

The Solution

is a simple Outlook VBA codepiece grabbing any vaulted eMail, opening it and copying it to a respective PST folder. Once opened and copied (the “copy” is key) it loses its vault link and gets its entire content back.

1: Search vaulted eMails

First of all, I defined an Outlook Search Folder to grab all vaulted eMails. This can be done by querying the .MessageClass field:

I went by the Search Folder idea as otherwise I’d have to walk through all eMails to find the vaulted ones. BTW: On vaulted eMails the MessageClass field reads “IPM.Note.EnterpriseVault.Shortcut” in its entirety.

2: Folder structure

I then wanted to replicate my folder tree in the target PST – just … well: just ’cause I’m used to. That’s a little recursion:

3: Get the search folder to retrieve the vaulted eMails from

Finding the respective search folder is just an iteration over all stores and figuring out the SearchFolder object with the right name.

4: Finally – the eMail copy routine

That one’s the major piece of it; with every eMail retrieved from the SearchFolder you got to

Open it by the MailItem.Display command; this creates an Inspector object
Grab the Application.ActiveInspector and from that the Inspector.CurrentItem
Once the MailItem is discovered you can copy it: currentItem.Copy. That’s a major step. You could just right away move the item into the target folder in your PST, but that would not void the vault link.
Finally – after that copy operation – you can now move the MailItem in the destined target folder (I made sure it is the same as in the original mail store): MailItem.Move targetFolderName
After moving, close the item without changes: MailItem.Close olDiscard

With that operation on any of the vaulted eMails they get freed and accessible without vault connection.

Enterprise Vault Outlook Download

Now – a few useful hints

for the benefit of your patience:

The Outlook forms cache is a tricky beast. As Enterprise Vault uses a bunch of custom forms to handle vaulted eMails, the forms cache is heavily used during this operation. I removed it before execution and also made sure that in case it gets scrambled again forms would be loaded from their original source instead to load’em from the cache. Here’s a few sources on the Outlook forms cache and the ForceFormReload registry key.
This still did not allow the macro to execute on all the 1300-something eMails I had to unvault. Ultimately, a simple DoEvents command in the macro’s main loop allowed Outlook to regularly recover from its heavy use of the forms cache.
Where to start? I used the namespace method PickFolder and simply chose the right folder to target my eMails to by the dialog it throws up.
Deletion after unvault: You might wanna consider deleting any vaulted eMail from your main mail store once it’s been copied to the PST.

How To Access Outlook Vault

So, finally the end result now resides within my Outlook Applicaiton as a VBA routine a

How To Add Enterprise Vault In Outlook