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Enterprise Vault™ Setting up Exchange Server Archiving

Last Published: 2018-03-29

Product(s): Enterprise Vault (12.3)

Defining additional MAPI properties in custom properties

In the <CUSTOMPROPERTIES> section of Custom Properties.xml, you define the additional MAPI properties that you want Enterprise Vault to evaluate or index.

Before MAPI properties can be defined in Custom Properties.xml, they must be defined in the MAPI subsystem. Currently, the Enterprise Vault custom properties feature supports the following types of MAPI properties:

Standard MAPI properties.
Enterprise Vault supports string and double property types. Properties can be single or multi-valued.
MAPI named properties.
These are MAPI properties with a property tag in the range 0x8000 - 0xFFFE. Enterprise Vault supports only string identifiers, so the named property Kind must be MNID_STRING. The property value can be a string or double property type. Properties can be single or multi-valued.

For each property that you want to include, you will need the following details from the property definition in the MAPI subsystem:

If the property is a standard MAPI property, the hexadecimal MAPI property tag. You can specify just the identifier part of the 32-bit hexadecimal MAPI property tag (bits 16 to 31), or the identifier part (bits 16 to 31) plus the property type part (bits 0 to 15). For example, if the MAPI Property tag for a standard property is 0x0070001E, the Enterprise Vault NAME value could be specified as either 0x0070001E or 0x0070.
If the property is a MAPI named property, the string ID and namespace GUID of the named property.

You can use third party MAPI tools, such as OutlookSpy, to view the MAPI properties associated with mailbox items.

Figure: Viewing MAPI properties shows how MAPI properties on a message are displayed in OutlookSpy.

Figure: Viewing MAPI properties

The selected property is the named property, "Keywords". This multi-valued property holds the Outlook categories assigned to the message. Details of the selected property are displayed on the right-hand side of the window.

Note that the "Keywords" property is only used here as an example of a MAPI named property. You do not need to add it as a custom property, because it is already indexed, and searchable and retrievable in a default Enterprise Vault system.

To make MAPI properties available to Enterprise Vault, you define them in the <CUSTOMPROPERTIES> section of Custom Properties.xml. The properties defined in this section can then be referenced in the content category and presentation sections.

Here is an example showing how properties can be defined:

<!-- 2. DEFINITION OF CUSTOM PROPERTIES AVAILABLE -->

<CUSTOMPROPERTIES>
  <NAMESPACE TYPE="MAPI" GUID="{DA6007CD-01AA-408f-B7D3-6DA958A09583}">
    <PROPERTY NAME="Author1" TAG="CaseAuthor"/>
    <PROPERTY NAME="Status1" TAG="CaseStatus"/>
  </NAMESPACE>
 
  <NAMESPACE TYPE="MAPI" GUID="{EF1A0001-01AA-408f-B7D3-6DA958A09583}">
    <PROPERTY NAME="Author2" TAG="Client"/>
  </NAMESPACE>

  <NAMESPACE TYPE="MAPI">
    <PROPERTY NAME="0x0070" TAG="Topic"/>
    </PROPERTY>
    <PROPERTY NAME="0x1035" TAG="MsgID"/>
    </PROPERTY>
  </NAMESPACE>
</CUSTOMPROPERTIES>

In this example there are three NAMESPACE elements. The first two define MAPI named properties, so the property namespace GUID is required. As the properties defined in the third NAMESPACE are standard MAPI properties, no GUID is required.

The value of the TYPE attribute identifies the property type; in this example, the properties are MAPI properties.

Within each NAMESPACE the properties are defined in PROPERTY elements using NAME and TAG values, as follows:

If the property is a MAPI named property, NAME is the string ID defined in the MAPI subsystem. The value is case-sensitive and must match exactly the value in the MAPI subsystem.
If the property is a standard MAPI property, NAME is either the Identifier part (bits 16 to 31) of the hexadecimal MAPI tag, or the identifier part (bits 16 to 31) plus the property type part (bits 0 to 15).
TAG identifies the property within Enterprise Vault. It must contain four or more alphanumeric characters (A-Z, a-z, or 0-9); spaces and underscore characters are not permitted. The value assigned to the property TAG must be unique within the XML file; although you can cross refer to the property using the TAG value, the same value cannot be used to identify any other entities in the file.
If you want to select messages by matching the values of specific properties, you need to create a <NAMEDPROP> filter in the appropriate XML ruleset file and specify the TAG value defined here.

More Information

About MAPI named property filters for custom filtering