About vaults

The vault is the primary object of a Meridian system and where the documents and other objects that Meridian manages reside. Its configuration determines many aspects of how the system will function. The information about vault documents, as opposed to the information contained within documents, is stored in a database.

For Meridian, the database format is invisible to the user. The vault looks and behaves the same whether it uses the Hypertrieve, SQL Server, or Oracle database engine. Meridian allows for multiple active vaults so that, for example, different departments can have their own vaults to store documents. This can be more efficient than using a single large vault because it allows each vault to have different document-naming conventions, folder structures, and workflows that may be unique to each department. By using multiple vaults, each department can retain its own standards and procedures, rather than conforming to a single vault configuration that attempts to meet the needs of all departments.

Vaults are created and maintained with the Meridian Enterprise Administrator tool as described in the BlueCielo Meridian Enterprise Administrator’s Guide.

The key element to creating and configuring vaults is planning. You should create a detailed specification of all types of documents to be stored in a vault, and the rules that will apply to each individual document type. This up-front work will save you many hours when you actually start to configure the system. The following topics describe the major aspects of a vault’s configuration.