eliminating PSTs

  • Thread starter Thread starter RobS
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RobS

OL98 and OL2000
Is there a way in these older versions of Outlook to keep
users from creating PST files? Q258277 works to eliminate
autoarchive and export to .pst, but doesn't keep users
form creating them. I know there's a DisablePST reg
entry that works for Office XP SP2, but I need something
for OL98 and 2000.

Thanks.
Rob
 
"RobS" said in news:[email protected]:
OL98 and OL2000
Is there a way in these older versions of Outlook to keep
users from creating PST files? Q258277 works to eliminate
autoarchive and export to .pst, but doesn't keep users
form creating them. I know there's a DisablePST reg
entry that works for Office XP SP2, but I need something
for OL98 and 2000.

Thanks.
Rob
Click to expand...

If you are in charge of managing many users and apparently want them to
all use your Exchange server, establish policy and anything that a
product can perform outside that policy is banned or will not be
supported. When they call about how to recover a .pst file or other
problems with it, "Sorry, you have been informed of the policy to not
support that feature. Your manager will be informed of your policy
violation." You finding a means of setting a registry value to disable
a function doesn't preclude the users from doing the same thing to
reenable it. If the users are logging onto a domain then there might be
a group policy that could enforce the behavior you want (I doubt it) but
that still doesn't stop them from logging on locally and running Outlook
to then create a .pst file or to edit their registry. If you don't want
to support some facet of a product then don't. Establish a policy that
gets okayed and which allows you to immediately cancel any user request
regarding that banned or unsupported feature.
 
RobS said:
OL98 and OL2000
Is there a way in these older versions of Outlook to keep
users from creating PST files?
Click to expand...

If you ever find a way to implement this policy, you are guaranteeing
yourself problems.
 
Brian, what problems are you referring to?
Click to expand...

One is that you'll either run out of storage space for the messages or
you'll run out of racks in which to store all the disks you'll need to store
all the messages you'll have. Another is a legal issue. Corporations have
often been required to cough up old mail messages in the course of a law
suit. We have 1,200 people at our facility here and many thousands more
world-wide. Some of these people need access to a majority of their
messages, even though it's years old. OL 2000 just can't provide that
without multiple PST files, since a PST can't (practically) exceed 1.5 Gb.
I suspect, though I have no proof, that 1.5 Gb per person would be a
practical limit on messages retained by Exchange as well. Without the
ability to create PSTs, mailboxes will fill up and messages will be lost.
Even if Outlook can handle larger stores when hosted by Exchange, dealing
with large numbers of messages without being able to group them adequately
is cumbersome at best.
 
Good points. In our case, our governing body (City
Council) has just approved a Records Mgt Policy which
requires us to keep all our e-mail on the Exchange
servers, and also to purge messages older than 90 days in
main mailbox folders. (E-mail has been deemed "not" an
official record, and therefore we're instructed to get rid
of old stuff. We've got 230gb of mail in our stores, and
as much spread out in .psts over several file server...
and need to get some of that .pst mail either
burned/archived, and the rest brought back into the stores
(with obvious mailbox limit increases). Not a fun task -
and somewhat impossible using our current technology.
Thanks for the input.
 
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