Windows Server Performance Team started a blog not so long ago... and one of subjects they talked about is issues that they are seeing when customers start keeping PST files on network shares. Whil...
Published Apr 03, 2007
Version 1.0
Blog Post
The reason why people in an Exchange environment archive to pst-files is;
1) it is being left on by the admin. The first time AutoArchive runs it prompts to enable (yes) or disable (no). In general people just click the yes button. Turn it off by using GPO
2) the mailboxes are scaled to small when compared with the mail retention policy of the company. True, Exchange DB size was a limitation (16GB) but that is no more (now 75GB). Give the user enough mailbox space to store the items in the company desires to keep. Diskspace certainly cannot be an issue as a pst-file is less efficient so it is better to store your mail in the Exchange database then anywhere else
3) why are pst-files ending up on the file server; because admins do set that by GPO (the disable policy is the one you should set; it's really close to the redirect policy!)
If you really don't want to go the route of server side archiving (in the Exchange database or by using a 3rd party application) and want to use pst-files keep them locally on the client. Sinds archives are semi-static data (only gets appended every now and then) you can use the pst-file backup add-in to remind you to make backup to the fileserver with a single click. Another way to go would be to actually treat the archive as an archive; close it after you have created it and make a backup and store that in a secure location. Since it is now fully static you can keep it locally. In case something goes wrong you still have the backup.
That's my 2 cents worth ;-)
1) it is being left on by the admin. The first time AutoArchive runs it prompts to enable (yes) or disable (no). In general people just click the yes button. Turn it off by using GPO
2) the mailboxes are scaled to small when compared with the mail retention policy of the company. True, Exchange DB size was a limitation (16GB) but that is no more (now 75GB). Give the user enough mailbox space to store the items in the company desires to keep. Diskspace certainly cannot be an issue as a pst-file is less efficient so it is better to store your mail in the Exchange database then anywhere else
3) why are pst-files ending up on the file server; because admins do set that by GPO (the disable policy is the one you should set; it's really close to the redirect policy!)
If you really don't want to go the route of server side archiving (in the Exchange database or by using a 3rd party application) and want to use pst-files keep them locally on the client. Sinds archives are semi-static data (only gets appended every now and then) you can use the pst-file backup add-in to remind you to make backup to the fileserver with a single click. Another way to go would be to actually treat the archive as an archive; close it after you have created it and make a backup and store that in a secure location. Since it is now fully static you can keep it locally. In case something goes wrong you still have the backup.
That's my 2 cents worth ;-)