Outlook Group policy - Auto Archive and .pst help

[Matt H]

Hi I've recently started using group policies to adjust domain-wide settings.
I've been toying with the idea of turning on auto-archive for everyone and
creating the archive .pst file out on their networked user drive where it
gets backed up nightly. I've been testing this with my own account (scary, I
know). It created an archive.pst and archived everything except my inbox. The
archive.pst is also in the default location, rather than the one I had hoped.
It ignored my "Misc./PST Settings/Default location for PST and OST files",
and "Tools /Other/AutoArchive/AutoArchive Settings" entries and it didn't
apply the settings to my inbox. I'm testing this with outlook 2007 on my
machine and see the same settings in the 2003 group policy settings. Anyone
ever set this up before? Any good or bad feedback would be great.
Thanks,
-Matt-

[Brian Day]

FYI.... PSTs stored/accessed over a network connection are not supported and
have not been since the Exchange 4.0 days. I only mention it because it is
true even though everyone and their brother does a setup like you mention.
:)

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/01/21/network-stored-pst-files-don-t-do-it.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019/en-us

Post by Matt H
Hi I've recently started using group policies to adjust domain-wide settings.
I've been toying with the idea of turning on auto-archive for everyone and
creating the archive .pst file out on their networked user drive where it
gets backed up nightly. I've been testing this with my own account (scary, I
know). It created an archive.pst and archived everything except my inbox. The
archive.pst is also in the default location, rather than the one I had hoped.
It ignored my "Misc./PST Settings/Default location for PST and OST files",
and "Tools /Other/AutoArchive/AutoArchive Settings" entries and it didn't
apply the settings to my inbox. I'm testing this with outlook 2007 on my
machine and see the same settings in the 2003 group policy settings. Anyone
ever set this up before? Any good or bad feedback would be great.
Thanks,
-Matt-

[Matt H]

Good info. In the past when someone hits the storage limit that is set on the
information store, we just manually configure auto-archive and save the
archive.pst file to their network folder. This ensures it is backed up and
doesn't count towards their overall exchange size. By law we have to
configure some data retention settings in case of public records requests.
Autoarchive and exchange's data retention options can help get us by until we
can afford and plan out a good email archiving system.

I just want to know if this can be done with group policy so that we don't
run into this anymore. We are a small enough organization and don't really
have anything in comparison to the writeup on technet that would affect
performance. The .ost and .pab would still be locally stored on the
workstations. The problem with backing the .pst files up on the workstations
using our backup exec software would be that most of our users aren't using
one computer. They often use several, and then we'd have multiple files
loaded on each workstation. That too would cause a little performance issue
if we had 3 to 5 copies of everyones .pst files strewn about.

I've found the options to set this in group policy and what I need to know
is how to properly configure it. I have this set up for myself and it is
archiving from group policy just fine, but the .pst policy is ignored all
together. I want to know if I need to set something else so that it will run
properly. I'd appreciate anyones input from experience or knowledge of this.

Thanks,
Matt

[Matt H]

Anyone?

[Angie]

I'm having the same issues saving to a network location manually. Could it
be that because MS doesn't support the configuration, they won't let you do
it in the GUI or GPO?

In my testing, I'm even trying a mapped drive, not a UNC path. It's a no
go. Says "The file name is not valid" when I try to archive manually. I was
hoping to get this working then also configure GPOs to handle it from there
on out.

As an aside, I can't even get my archive.pst file copied to a network
location. I tried disconnecting it from Outlook (2007), closing Outlook,
renaming the file locally (which did work). I always get permission denied
when I try to move it - even though I have rights both locally and on the
network location.

In my situation, I can copy it to another PC's hard drive, which makes me
wonder if there is already some PST restrictions in our GPOs. I have yet to
dig into that portion.

[Matt H]

I'm not really having trouble manually saving to a networked drive. I just
want to save myself the headache of manually configuring a couple hundred
users and every new user after that. I can have it save to the c:/ through
GPO, but the .pst and .ost policies are completely ignored when outlook is
opened. In the worst case I'd just have to change the location of the file
from c: to netoworked drive manually. I'm going to try the UNC path using
environment variable for the username as they all have individual file shares
for their server space. I'll update this post when I see whether or not that
affects anything.

When you take a look at your currently configured GPO's, definately install
the latest group poicy editor from Microsoft as it will list your policies
and all of the configurations that aren't default for each one. It makes
policies very easy to look at!

Good luck to you.