Outlook Archival Plan

[Tyras]

Morning,
We currently have about 25 users all using Outlook 2003 as their email client. Over the past few years, everyone has done a great job of saving all of their emial (except spam of course). So now I started here and one of the first things I recognize is horrendously large PST's. (most in excess of 500mb, some over 1gig!)
So my plan now is too enact soem sort of archival plan by year and have the archived pst's by year on our intranet for DL is they are needed.
My question is what is the best way to automate this process of scheduled archivals? I don't mind some not too expensive software, or some legwork on my part. Is it possible to control archivial settings and times via GPO? If so, can anyone point me in the right direction on that? Or is there another solution alltogether that would work out better?

Thanks in advance

 

[58sniper]

You don't mention if you are using Exchange. If so, this question is better asked in the Exchange forums. Also, if so, there are plenty of archiving solutions for archiving in SQL.

Archiving to .pst is never the answer. While you could use a GPO to enable the archiving in Outlook, you'll end up with .pst files that are stored on the local workstations. And that, is just full of problems. .pst files on a server aren't supported, and prone to many problems.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[Tyras]

Ahh yes sorry for that. We are not using exchange, but just imap accounts to our host provider. As far as the PST's i was thinking of writing a script to automatically cop them to the server mostly for the sake of saving them. Having each user's target folder for saving it in their profile somewhere (we have roaming profiles I should mention.)

All in all my whole idea for doing this doesn't much please me, so I am really open to something completely different.

Damn compliance!

Thanks for the response 58sniper

Tyras