Viewing and Quickly Searching Archived Email

[Guest]

I have been handed a side project from our Company's CFO. Here is the
scenario: Our CFO has multiple years worth of archived email on DVD. He is
looking for a solution to be able to quickly search through those emails
without having to switch out DVD's. One solution I thought about was setting
up multiple mailboxes for each year of archived email and then using outlook
to search and retrieve emails as he needs them. We run Exchange Server 2003
with Outlook 2003. I really don't want to place the archived PST files on
his local machine for backup reasons. Has anyone ever had to create a
solution for this? Importing the PST files into seperate mailboxes would be
my absolute last resort. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Placing a pst-file on a DVD will not solve it for you as Outlook needs
Read/Write access to the file and a DVD is read only.

So you should place (a copy of) the pst-file on the local harddrive. Since
they are archived he should not modify the pst-file anymore so backup should
not be an issue (is already backed up to DVD).

Me personally wouldn't want to have archived data in the Exchange database.
Exchange datastorage is one of the most expensive per MB stored (consider
general server responsiveness, backup/restore time, maintenance time, etc).

One of my favorite archiving tools is
http://www.howto-outlook.com/redirect.asp?id=mapilab_archiver
With this tool you can create a CHM file which is indexed (fast search) and
can be read from a read only medium.
If you decide to order use "4PM76A8" to get a discount.

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-FREE tool; QuickMail. Create new Outlook items anywhere from within Windows
-Properly back-up and restore your Outlook data

-----
I have been handed a side project from our Company's CFO. Here is the
scenario: Our CFO has multiple years worth of archived email on DVD. He is
looking for a solution to be able to quickly search through those emails
without having to switch out DVD's. One solution I thought about was
setting
up multiple mailboxes for each year of archived email and then using outlook
to search and retrieve emails as he needs them. We run Exchange Server 2003
with Outlook 2003. I really don't want to place the archived PST files on
his local machine for backup reasons. Has anyone ever had to create a
solution for this? Importing the PST files into seperate mailboxes would be
my absolute last resort. Any help would be greatly appreciated.