The SharePoint Servers and site collections to be archived by the archiving tasks are defined using Targets in the Administration Console. These reflect the SharePoint structure: a virtual server target points to the SharePoint virtual server to be archived, site collection targets point to the top-level sites on the SharePoint server, and site targets point to subsites.

Before you can configure the archiving targets in Enterprise Vault, the site collections must exist in SharePoint and the Enterprise Vault components must have been installed and configured on the SharePoint server

When you add a SharePoint target URL, you can auto-enable site collection archiving and assign default values for the archiving task, vault store, policy and Retention Category to be used. Subsites will be archived automatically using the default settings for the target URL. If new subsites are created, these will be automatically included in the archiving. Documents archived from a site collection are stored in the same archive.

If automatic site collection archiving is not enabled, or you want to override the default settings for a site collection, you can create site collection targets and subsite targets manually under the target URL. For example, you may want to use a different archiving policy for a particular site collection.

For a site collection, you can limit the scope of archiving to the top level web site only, the subsites only, or both.

When the archiving task runs, a SharePoint archive is created automatically for each SharePoint site collection. In the Administration Console tree, you can see the archives under Archives > SharePoint. Documents in the top level site and all subsites of that site collection are stored in the same archive.

Figure: An example SharePoint archiving configuration illustrates the relationship between a SharePoint 3.0 Web application and site collections on the SharePoint server (on the left) and associated target objects in the Enterprise Vault Administration Console (on the right). Also illustrated is a SharePoint 2003 virtual server and site collections (on the left), and associated target objects in the Enterprise Vault Administration Console (on the right).

Site Collection C is not being archived, so only Site Collection D on SharePoint Virtual Server B has a target Site Collection object in Enterprise Vault.

In this example, automatic archiving of site collections will not be enabled on the SharePoint target B.