Archive folders and PST's

[Hillary]

Hello,

Need some advice on the proper way to store and archive emails through
Outlook 2007. I have about 40 end users that keep every email that they ever
received. I can't change what they do because they are consultants and they
need this for record keeping.

I noticed that they have many archive folders and some have a combo of PST
and archives or just pst. I know that having many archive folders and pst
folders will slow the performance of Outlook 2007 down.

What is a better solution for people. Oh and they don't want to save it to
the server and remove it from the display of Outlook - they want access to
every email when they need it.

Please and thanks

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Archives and pst-files are exactly the same thing. The term "Archive" is
actually only used separately when referring to the pst-file that has been
linked with the AutoArchive feature of Outlook. From a technical point of
view, it is just like any other pst-file.

That said, having multiple pst-files connected to Outlook does not equal
directly in slow performance. This will usually only happen when they have a
significant amount of pst-files which are very large >2GB, often get data
added/removed from it, are set to be indexed and are located on a
(relatively) slow hard disk. If they are happy with the performance, leave
it as is. If they are not, teach them how they can disconnect and reconnect
pst-files in Outlook and see if it makes a difference performance wise.

If you like to go for a more central approach, take a look at archiving
solutions for Exchange. Do not move the pst-files to a network location and
connect to them from there since that is not supported by Microsoft and
could lead to poor performance or even data loss.