Enterprise Vault™ Using the Enterprise Vault Analytics Connector
About the Enterprise Vault Analytics Connector
The Enterprise Vault Analytics Connector enables proprietary and third party applications, such as analytics or machine learning applications, to access Enterprise Vault index metadata for items that Enterprise Vault archives. You can use the connector with both on-premise and cloud applications.
This section describes how the Analytics Connector takes index metadata for items in Enterprise Vault, and passes the metadata to the third party application.
Figure: Analytics Connector overview illustrates where the Analytics Connector sits within Enterprise Vault.
The following points summarize how Enterprise Vault uses the connector during the archiving process:
The Enterprise Vault Storage service stores items in an archive.
Storage Crawler, which is hosted by the Storage service, then looks for items in the archive that need indexing.
Storage Crawler then calls Enterprise Vault Indexing to index the items.
The Storage Crawler checks to see if an Analytics Connector is configured for the current archive.
If a connector is configured, the Storage Crawler checks to see what data and index properties the connector requires.
For each item that Enterprise Vault indexes, the Storage Crawler creates a text file in the output folder that is specified in the connector configuration. The file contains the requested metadata for the item, and content, if requested.
See Example output file.
At regular intervals, the third party application processes new files in the output folder. Typically, you would schedule a task to retrieve the files.
After processing the files, the third party application is also responsible for managing the deletion of the output files.
You can configure several instances of the Analytics Connector. For example, if you want to retrieve different index properties for different groups of archives, you would configure a different instance of the connector for each group of archives.
The configuration for all of the Analytics Connectors in the Enterprise Vault site resides in the single file, CrawlerPluginsSettings.xml.
See Creating the Analytics Connector configuration file.
When you configure an instance of the Enterprise Vault Analytics Connector, you specify the following:
The archives to which the connector instance applies.
The metadata that the third party application needs in order to perform its analysis. For example, you list in the connector configuration the item index properties that the application requires.
The output folder, where the connector puts the data for the application to retrieve.
The index properties that the Analytics Connector can request are the same as those available for use in Enterprise Vault classification rules or policies, plus folderid (archive folder ID) and ssid (saveset ID). For details of the available index properties, see the Enterprise Vault classification documentation.
Attributes that Enterprise Vault indexes include those produced by the following features:
Compliance Accelerator department tags
Message direction
Enterprise Vault classification tags
Enterprise Vault content conversion
Enterprise Vault Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Enterprise Vault custom filters
Partner filters