One of the things that is mentioned a lot on these forums is the Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-in. But what is it?
In a nutshell the Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-in provides a number of abilities to Outlook users:
Possibly the most common thing that it allows you to do is to retrieve items that have been archived. The Add-in is closely integrated with Outlook so when you double click on an item which is archived Outlook passes control to the Add-in and the Add-in then performs a number of actions which eventually include displaying the retrieved version of the archived item.
It has other actions such as archiving, restoring, deleting, cancelling, PST migration, searching and an Archive Explorer component which allows the archive to be viewed along with it's structure.
The Add-in is governed by the Enterprise Vault Desktop Policy associated with the users mailbox and archive. This policy controls which options are available on the Outlook ribbon (Outlook 2010 and higher) or the Outlook toolbar (Outlook 2007 and lower), and it controls other things like Vault Cache and Virtual Vault. They too are part of the Outlook Add-in.
Until just recently there were two types of Outlook Add-in, a 'full' Outlook Add-in (also known as the DCOM Add-in) and a 'light' Outlook Add-in (also known as the HTTP Add-in). The Add-ins offered slightly different functionality, with some things not being possible in the HTTP Add-in (such as viewing the Enterprise Vault tab on the properties of a folder in Outlook). The HTTP Add-in was needed though if you wanted to use Outlook 2010. There were also different versions of the Add-in for different languages.
With Enterprise Vault 10.0.2 all this has changed, and finally been drawn together in to one Add-in. Just one! Now all you need is to install that one MSI file on any supported version of Outlook with any (supported) language.