contentACCESS Version 2.6
✨ Highlights
- Introduces the first version of clustering, enabling distributed contentACCESS server environments with improved scalability, performance, and load-balanced job execution.
- Adds major job management and scheduling enhancements, including active/deactivated job states, extended scheduler options, improved navigation, sorting, filtering, and auto-refresh.
- Expands email archiving capabilities with mailbox recovery, mailbox mover, legacy MAM EE integration, a MAPI connector, and improved job configuration and filtering.
- Enhances file system archiving and recovery, including manual recovery via contentWEB, recovery and restore jobs, and options to archive and delete original items.
- Improves contentWEB, Virtual Drive, and client applications with new export options, better access to inactive items, mandatory proxy usage for mobile, and overall usability and monitoring improvements.
Common features
✓ Scalability: contentACCESS version 2.6 introduces the first version of clustering, a great way to make business processes more scalable and thus improve performance. From now on, it is possible to create a distributed environment of multiple contentACCESS servers and run jobs on a specific or any available node. You can install the full contentACCESS, including Central Administration, on one node and only the contentACCESS server component on other nodes to achieve optimal parallelism for running jobs. The administrator can decide whether a job will be assigned to a specific node or processed by available nodes based on a load-balanced or first-win strategy. If a node is inactive or has network problems accessing the contentACCESS database, it is shut down by the system.
“Cluster” page with the list of installed nodes
Node configuration options in the “Change node” dialog
✓ Active Job / Deactivated Job / Delete job: Jobs can now have active or inactive status, with the possibility to use filters. The three job categories are:
- Active jobs: jobs run based on the schedule; the data is accessible.
- Deactivated jobs: jobs do not run (and cannot be started manually); the data is accessible, and jobs are visible using appropriate filters.
- Deleted jobs: permanently deleted jobs; data is no longer accessible.
Activate/Deactivate/Delete options from the job’s context menu
Activate/Deactivate options from the job’s status pane
Filtering between active and deactivated jobs on the “Jobs” page
✓ Weekmap scheduler was extended with two new options:
- stop the job at the interval end
- run only once per interval
For example, in the picture below, the “stop job at interval end” option is selected, so the job starts on Monday at 18:00 and stops at 19:00, even if it has not finished yet.
Extended scheduler configuration options
✓ Authentication supports single sign-on into third-party systems.
✓ Setup improvements: Automated setup routines now handle updates of all contentACCESS components without requiring uninstallation.
✓ Due to changes in Central Administration links, it is now possible to use the back/forward buttons in your browser.
✓ Better navigation in Central Administration: Navigate directly to the last job run logs from a job or from the job list.
Navigation to the last job run from the “Logs” button of the job’s status pane
Navigation to the last job run from the job’s context menu
✓ Default values are now highlighted in columns for storages, shortcuts, retention, and databases.
Grid information extended with default values
✓ Better navigation in Central Administration: Central Administration remembers the last accessed page and automatically navigates to it on the next login.
✓ New possibilities to sort jobs by different columns and filter jobs in the jobs view.
Sorting jobs by different columns
✓ Auto refresh was added to the job list.
Enabling auto refresh on the Jobs page
✓ Configurable job history counter in Monitoring: You can set the maximum number of logs kept per job. This is useful for frequently running jobs that require more historical logs. The history counter can be configured at system, tenant, and job levels, with automatic inheritance from higher levels. Lower-level settings override higher-level ones.
Opening the tenant-level monitoring settings
Setting maximum history count at the system level
Setting maximum history count at the job level
Setting maximum history count at the tenant level
Opening the system or job-level monitoring settings from the “Runs” grid
✓ New filtering options in Monitoring: Select all errors, warnings, or information entries by event type.
Email archive
✓ Mailbox recovery is a new processing type in email archive jobs. It can recreate both messages and shortcuts in an Exchange mailbox using the archive. You can recover shortcuts or original emails, which is useful when mailboxes, folders, or items are accidentally deleted. The recovery process can reconstruct the mailbox as it was and create missing folders with the correct folder type. Duplicate checks are performed at the folder level, and only the newest mail is recovered. Limitations include:
- Contacts can be recovered only into a contacts folder.
- Appointments can be recovered only into an appointments folder.
- Tasks can be recovered only into a tasks folder.
Creating an “Email recovery” job
Processing settings of a recovery job
✓ The Mailbox mover feature allows moving one or more mailboxes into a different database and/or storage. This can be done by creating a new mailbox move job or directly from the address book. A consolidation option is available to store archived data from multiple databases or storages into a single location.
Creating a “Mailbox move” job
Specifying mailboxes to move from the job’s configuration page
Setting up a “Mailbox move” job from the “View address book” page
✓ Legacy data connector: You can now connect an existing MAM EE archive to contentACCESS, enabling hybrid archiving. After installing the Legacy MAM EE retrieve server and completing a simple configuration, old MAM EE shortcuts can be retrieved through contentACCESS.
Setup tools extended with “Legacy archive connector for MAM EE”
Legacy data configuration in Central Administration
✓ MAPI connector allows connecting to Exchange Server using MAPI instead of EWS. Note that some functions may still use EWS, so EWS must also be configured.
Selecting MAPI connection on the job’s configuration page
✓ Wildcard support was added to the global exclude message class list. (Supported formats: Contains: *Test*, EndsWith: *Test, StartsWith: IPM*)
✓ Folder permission synchronization during mailbox crawl ensures folder permissions are read and synchronized in the archive.
✓ Email archive job selection is now easier: first select the job type, then configure the settings.
WARNING FOR UPDATES FROM VERSION 2.5 TO 2.6: AFTER THE UPDATE, ALL JOBS WILL HAVE THE EMAIL ARCHIVE JOB TYPE. IF YOU HAD A RESTORE JOB BEFORE THE UPDATE, IT MUST BE RE-CREATED. THIS APPLIES ONLY TO UPDATES TO VERSION 2.6.
Setting up a new “Email archive” job
A restore job converted into an Email archive job
File system archive
✓ Manual recovery allows recovery of one or more files or entire folders directly from contentWEB, using either the original modification date or the recovery date.
Manual recovery from contentWEB
Configurable modification date of recovered files
✓ Archiving with delete original items: Files are archived and then deleted from the original location. Shortcuts are not created. Archived items remain accessible via contentWEB or Virtual Drive shared folders.
Deleting the original item when archiving a file
✓ File system recovery job: Recover lost data from the archive by copying deleted files to local disk. You can recover files, folders, or shortcuts with either the original or recovery date.
Creating a “File system recovery” job
Active “RECOVERY” job on the File Archive Jobs page
Processing settings of a recovery job
✓ The file system restore job restores shortcuts by replacing them with original files from the archive, using either the original modification date or the restoration date.
Configuring the modification date for a file system restore job
Client applications:
contentWEB:
✓ File system archive export to ZIP: Select one or more folders or files for export. Files are zipped on the server and can be downloaded from the Tasks list.
Exporting archived files to ZIP in contentWEB
Downloading exported items from the Tasks list
✓ Export messages to PST or ZIP: Export folders or emails to PST or ZIP. ZIP exports include MSG files and a manifest.xls file.
Exporting archived emails to PST or ZIP in contentWEB
Downloading PST files from the Tasks list
Downloading ZIP files from the Tasks list
Downloaded PST files
Manifest file: Resume tab
Manifest file: Files tab
✓ Download items (messages/files) by double-click. This option is configurable.
Configuring the “download with double-click” action from contentWEB Settings
✓ contentACCESS Mobile: From this version, use of the contentACCESS proxy server is mandatory. The deployment package is available in the Tools section of the setup.
Proxy web services accessible from the setup tools
contentACCESS Mobile download from Central Administration
Virtual Drive:
✓ Virtual Drive configuration now supports Windows Authentication using the Virtual Drive service user. A valid Windows user must be configured during installation and assigned to a contentACCESS user.
✓ Active and inactive items: Version 2.6 allows access to both active and inactive archived items directly from Virtual Drive, which is useful for environments not using contentWEB.
Virtual Drive settings extended with “Show inactive items”
✓ It is not allowed to use “localhost” as the Virtual Drive server name.