Handling of Email Archive/PST Files

Since I'm not cool enough to twitter =), here's a warning to those of you flying from DIA as you leave the conference. I was in the security line for a full hour...plan accordingly! Also, the shuttle expects you to be at the planetariam, not the law school, so although my driver finally called me, you might want to confirm the pickup point if you're leaving from the school.
Thanks to the CALI crew for another great conference!
Cyndi

Survey? I'm more of the rambling type. :-)

Frankly several of our situations have pressed the bounds of what's possible
forcing us to take individual approaches to some of the bigger problems.
Normally, we let the user go until their mailbox quota nears full. Then we
step in with a single archive .pst. When that grows beyond a couple of GB,
we then divide the .pst into multiple files creating one for each year.

We have found that even this can become a problem if you have to many years,
or a single year gets too large. At this point we detach older .pst files
and put those on a portable drive the user can plug in and the reattach the
files in Outlook when they need access to that data.

Of course, all of this makes backing up a pain as the .pst files are large
and one small change means your backup program has to backup the (often)
1-2GB file for the minor change. Hopefully though archives of last year's
emails don't change much.

Personally, I'd love to take all archives older than 1 year and load them
into Google Apps. Install Google Desktop and let them search the online and
local archive simultaniously. I think we're probably headed this way. But
I'm not sure how we'll automate the yearly "archive".

Even then... I suspect in a few years Google Apps storage (commonly 25GB)
will be insufficient for some users.

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 6:59 AM, Bradley, Jason <
jason.bradley@law.vanderbilt.edu> wrote:

> Teknoids,
>
> We are investigating the most prudent approach to the handling of email
> archive and PST files for our faculty and staff. I’d like to get an idea of
> what you all are doing and have created a [very] brief survey at:
> http://tinyurl.com/nm7cqg
>
> In particular, Microsoft has particular policies regarding what works and
> is supported, what works but is not supported, and what doesn’t work (see
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019 for details). We are trying to
> gauge the efforts being made by other law schools.
>
> I greatly appreciate your time should you choose to participate and I’ll
> happily share the results (minus any uniquely identifiable information) with
> the group.
> *
> Jason Bradley, MCSE, MCTS
> *Director of Information Technology
> Vanderbilt University Law School
> ( Phone: 615.875.9428
>
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