Discussion on:

The 10 most important things to teach your Outlook users

Just thought I should point out that the 2GB file size limit only applies to pre Outlook 2003 versions. Since Outlook 2003 there is theoretically no limit, but current MS advice says don't exceed 20GB!!

Beside item #6 (the obsolate 2 GB size limit of the personal folder files), I'd also comment on item #5 (Email is stored locally). It would need a bit more detail if we wanted a complete and correct statement. Downloaded messages don't disappear from the Mailbox on the server. The offline store (OST file) and the Mailbox on the server are kept in synch. Messages _moved_ from the offline store (OST) to personal folders (PST) do disappear from the server at the next synchronisation, though.

The configuration you describe is possible, but Outlook can be also be configured to download to the .OST and delete from the server. Indeed, I have laptop users who accidentally do this when on the road.

I'd suggest a bit of clarification here.
Exchange operators most likely do backup the server but they are unlikely to backup the personal folders on the users' computers. We shouldn't confuse the two types of backup.
If users moved messages from the OST (which is in synch with the Mailbox on the server) into PST files (which or stored on a local computer), they have to take care of their PST files.
Some organisations create various other types of backup (and archives) on the servers, and these can be sources of recovery if PST files are lost. Don't confuse these additional techniques with the backup of the Exchange servers.

The comment about the 2gb PST file size limitation only applies to ANSI type PST files. ANSI type PST files were created by Outlook 97-2002. Many people used their old Ansi PST files with Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010 and so may face the 2gb maximum file size limitation (as will as maximum message counts for each folder). For offices that do not have exchange server and may have multiple ANSI type PST files that they would like to convert to Unicode type PST files created and used by Outook 2003, 2007, and 2010 and which do not have the 2gb limitation you will appreciate an amazingly effective and inexpensive utility from Peter Maclean called Upstart. It can be found here: http://www.maclean.com/upstart.php
It is a must because hitting the 2gb limit can happen without warning and can result in data loss if you do not have a recent backup of your PST file to fall back to.
Upstart makes converting a breeze.
But having said that, it generally is a good idea to keep your PST file, even a Unicode type PST file, as small as possible as corruption can strike anytime and it becomes very time consuming to repair large PST files. Configure Outlook to utilize AutoArchive to push older items off to an Archive PST file (a secondary PST file) as a simple way to keep things under control.
Good luck.

We're currently moving to an O365 mail solution and have been told that all email (even for Outlook users) will be kept server side.

Outlook users will be able to work 'offline' and sync their mail when they come back on-line but I don't think that's what you mean is it?

It might be a dumb question, I have thirteen years of lotus notes support under my belt but no Outlook experience.

I think the author is maintly talking about home or small office use. I don't know of any large organization that uses Outlook and stores the email on the local workstation (too difficult to backup email on the local workstation). When this happens it is usually a user that creates a PST and moves email into it.

All the email protocols allow you to keep email on the server, but the default setting for all except for the exchange protocol default to removing it off the server.

Bill

There are many options. To talk 2 GB limit is limiting your knowledge and your users capability coments above have clarified that. However, I do see a reason from a support side of the fence to try and limit users. Push for a company policy that exchange team (or IT in general) does not support pst files and limit users mailbox size. This seems to work in several places I have worked at. If you do that you do not have to concern yourself with annoying PST files. This would remove a lot of work for no reason. All about user education.

For your list it amazes me that you make some of these statements. While logical a few years ago they may not be logic now.

Point one. Most of tis is dictated by company policy. Versioning and support is such a touchy subject. Have seen some users complain about OSH issues with new formating with 2010 OWA. They demanded rolling back or they would take it to the union. They just email the online reference on how to modify their interface.

Point two can be covered by a good security policy and who has rights to send to certain groups. I am sure most organisations have ristricted send to all grouping. Also why is it a IT issue if the user is one of those people that only removes the foot in their mouth to only replace it with the other foot.

Point three, really. Though I understand some users need better understanding but really good company management from Risk, Security, email teams should cover this off.

Point four, Are you living in the year 2012? Spend time with user to customise their interface? Really? Microsoft has some great instructions for the average user to do this stuff. Half of it will be controlled by policy, the other half is that most business do not have the money to have IT staff hand holding most users. Yes this is a IT issue, but more of a Project Management issue when upgrading to a new version where is the user training?

Point five is not a good point. THis will be dictated to by company policy. We are usually not all using IMAP4 so situations may change. This is a bad comment to make.

Point six. Not correct for different formats. Others have commented on this. All I will say is stop using Exchange 2000 and move up to a newer version.

Point seven. Yes they can work, but good luck. It would also be great to work at a company that has the time to handhold users corrupted PST files and OST files. Actually, if it is a corrupted OST file, tell them to download it again. Recreate their profile. They will not be happy but it will work.

Point Eight. Agree now do you have the budget to train users to support this? Also are you just using portable hard drives? most PC have limited space, most network shares are limited as a lot of companies are pushing for sharepoint. good luck uploading a PST to sharepoint. If not you must have a big budget for PC's and laptop's and their support.

Point Nine. Company policy is the best policy. Depends on where you work. Are you under compliance? This is the best policy. Goes back to using PST files.

Point Ten. Really? I can't believe you are making this comment.

Susan, you make some really good points, from a desktop support point of view. However, it really depends on the size of the team, amount of users, etc, etc, etc. Above all the budget of your department. Desktop team usually make some personal relationships beyond the IT support and users will exploit them. Company policy has to be the be all and end all for most of these comments. You really need to clarify these comments as I have made comments from a large corporate point of view. These clash with what you are saying, which I did on purpose. Understand there are different levels for this sort of support. Try telling someone that works in a Citrix environment that their users should download emails to a PST. Explain to management that you need another TB of SAN space for users Email PST files. I can go on. However, I do agree with you with one thing. We are here for the users so that they can do their job in the best way possible. Regardless of where we are in IT. If there is no business there is no us supporting or building. Keep up the good work.

@Turin73 I guess you work at a middle or large size company, as I do. I am not sure the same can be said for all of TR's readers.

Many smaller companies either do not enforce a policy on email clients, or only enforce limited ones, so I feel that all of the points in this article are perfectly reasonable. Many of us will also be responsible for looking after family and friends, and so will find value in this for that purpose.

And despite working for a company that has a rigorous policy applied to OS, browser, and access rights, as well as email, I managed today for the first time to do an embarrassing "reply all".

Your criticism is probably perfectly valid for your own situation.

I represent your assertion with multiple examples. Not one of the companies I work with has any email policy. Most don't even mention the obvious, like don't be installing torrent downloaders on company computers. The bosses usually just assume the employees are smart and reasonable.

Funny thing is most of the are. I have a pretty tight relationship with a lot of the key users in all these locations, and I've shown them how to try to be safe. So although the companies have no formal policies, informally there is someone pushing things in the right direction. Me.

This document needs to be updated. Some of the features have been updated starting in the 2007 version.

The problem with the autoarchive is it merely delays the decision of what to keep and what to throw away. Autoarchive should be disabled, and users should move messages into a .PST manually.

Autoarchive saves everything to the .PST regardless of it's value. When users have to move messages manually then they're more likely to filter the messages as they go, archiving what they need and discarding what they don't. This is easier to do when they're filtering a few at a time. It is a much larger task to filter the messages after the .PST has grown too large and requires immediate attention to several thousand messages. Then there's the additional time-consuming step of compacting the .PST after the users had cleaned it up.

I recommend adding the 'Size' column to each users' display, then teaching them how to sort on the column headings. Full mailboxes and .PSTs are not caused by the sheer number of messages but by the size of individual messages, usually due to bloated attachments. Sorting the messages by size allows the user to see the real troublemakers.

I think the best advice possible is to quit using desktop applications for online data like e-mail. Use IMAP if needed to keep the e-mail on the server, where it can be properly backed up and indexed for compliance.

Google Apps for Business is also a great idea if you have a small company, want to have email, calendars and shared cooperative doc/spreadsheet/presentation editing. At US$50 per user per year, it's also dirt cheap.

save your outlook data as data in een separate folder ex My Outlook Data Files

Something I find all too often from Outlook users is that they accidentally zoom in or out, without realizing it (usually done by holding CTRL and scrolling the mouse wheel.) They fix it by making the font larger/smaller on new messages and the recipients gets odd looking mail. Unfortunately, until 2010, the Zoom option(s) were hidden or in different locations depending on making a new message or reading an existing one. To make things more complicated, this can happen on a laptop w/o a mouse. I recently found that the track pad scrolling function with CTRL doesn't necessarily work the same as a mouse wheel with CTRL.

I have several users with 15GB PST files. I normally split the pst in smaller sizes, but 10, 15, 18GB PST file works well in Office 2007 / Windows 7.

If you have multiple clients over a single POP3 account, don't forget to keep your copies on server by not automatically deleting after mails read.

Some while ago I found that many of my mails failed to move into the Archive. This was because I was constantly looking at my old messages, this caused the date that Auto Archive uses to decide what to archive (Modified date?) to become more recent than the set Archive date - hence those mails stayed put (very frustrating)! These dates are NOT the sent/received dates that are normally displayed. - Consult the Date/Time fields in Customisation of Inbox & Sent Items.
Manual Archiving by the creation of an off line Outlook Data File and drag & drop from Inbox /Sent Items after sorting into date oder offers more control along with the possibility of making a structured archive and being able to undo a mistake.
Another problem was that archives moved to CD/DVD (maybe evenUSB) could not be viewed unless they were restored to the PC.

The problem is that Outlook needs 'Write' access to the .PST, even if you're only going to look at it. That's why you have to move .PSTs off a CD or DVD to a write-able medium (like the local hard drive). In theory, flash drives should work.

Starting with Outlook 2007, the Auto Archive behaviour was changed to archive based on the modified date instead of the received/sent date. There is a registry edit that one can do to change the behaviour so that Outlook archives based on the received/sent date.
http://www.outlook-tips.net/outlook-2010/tip-873-archiving-by-received-date-in-outlook/
I wish I worked in places that could have a self determined email policy but my clients are goverment regulated and are not allowed to delete any email (which interestingly actually includes spam!). So I have to keep everything and archive everything. When the archive files get large I split them into annual files (ie archve2010.pst) using Upstart (the utility by Peter Maclean mentioned in my previous post http://www.maclean.com/upstart.php).

Despite my recommendation to manually archive old messages, the CEO insisted on using AutoArchive which I had to set up with a new pst file quarter so the pst wouldn't get too big.
Several times a year, the CEO would call me to tell me that some emails are not AutoArchiving according to the date received. I had to re-explain that (as you found out), AutoArchive works on the date modified not the date received.
It's job security I guess.
One other "gotcha" is that you can set a message to "Do not AutoArchive".
Options > More Options > Do not AutoArchive.
I don't understand how that is useful but you have to manually archive those.

This article looks as if it was written several years ago. Starting with Outlook 2003, the 1.8GB limitiation went away with a new 'hypothetical' limit of 30GB (Office365 support up to 25GB for cloud Exchange and others cloud providers usually around 4GB).

There seems to be a common thread in the list discussing PST vs. OST files. This is causing lots of confusion. PST files are stored on the local machine and, if you are running Exchange, are removed from the server at each sync. OST files remain on the server and the local machine syncs an offline copy of the mailbox. The file type determines the backup method. There is an add-in for local PST files that must be run on the local machine at a set schedule for backup. The OST files should be backed up daily on the Exchange Server by an administrator (if not, the admin should be replaced). No local backup is required.

I also must disagree with the use of HTML, images and links to compose an email message. GIF and PNG files work fine, while JPEG will get you flagged. Good use of basic HTML is widely accepted and shouldn't cause an issue and links used appropriately also should be fine.

This article needs a definite update.

OST files are on the local machine, it's a local cache of the email stored on the Exchange server. PSTs should be backed up, OSTs can be recreated from the Exchange server.

We wanted to get rid of the storage on the Exchange server, but we didn't wan't the trouble of users using their hard drives for PST; so we put all user files on each office main server, and did backups of that server per office. This distributed the backup load, and made the size of the data easier to handle. Any decent server since 2005 has had terabytes of space for more than enough storage. So we weren't even running into any limits. This system worked so well; I doubt if we had any problems all the way to the end of that contract.

We might as well have been running dumb terminals after that, because nothing was saved on the user station, and if anything went wrong, we just wiped and re-installed. No individual user workstation files to worry about.

The problem with this scenario is PST located in the network drive is not recommended. PST must be located locally in the computer.

You can keep the PST in every computer of the network, by user, and then backup pst with special tool to central location (your server) with special apps like EdgeSafe PST Backup. (http://www.datamills.com/products/edgesafe-pst-backup).

This tools backup pst even if outlook is open, backup pst from local store to central server or location and make incremental backups for pst files. This keep the pst backup process simple and straight forward, without user intervension and keep your PST in a central location (and because incremental backups can be done, your save network traffics and backup time).

I'm wondering how many users do you currently keep with PST locates in the server and if the server have special hard drive requirements (SSDs, NAS, SAN, RAID's, etc) because having 100 users with 10GB psts in a single server is a hard disk intensive task (and hard drives will broke in 6 months)

The .PST definitely does not have to be located on the local computer. I've never seen that recommendation anywhere, but I'll welcome outside references. We've always stored most .PSTs on a network server without any problems due to it.

I wouldn't recommend anyone have a 10Gb .PST, if for no other reason than it can't be written to a DVD for archival purposes.

Back in the day of Outlook 2000 Microsoft recomended not putting PST files on a network share, but I have not heard that warning in a very long time, and have ignored the advice even way back then despite reconizing the risks. Network reliability has made problems with this issue largely dissappear, but the configuration can still be problematic. If for some reason the network located pst file is not available and Outlook it started then Outlook barks at the user that the file can not be found and prompts for direction on how to proceed. One of the options offered is to create a new PST file which is stored locally. When the user selects this option they find that all of their old mail, contacts, and calendar items are missing though they are able to send/receive new mail. This results in the workstation needing to have Outlook reconfigured and the mail collected in the new pst file blended into the priginal network PST file. This is just one example of the shortcommings of having the PST file on a network share. But the benifit of backup alone far outweighs the risks in my opinion.

I saw the problem you described early in our deployment of Outlook. Now I explain it to the user almost exactly as you did above. Like you, I consider the ease of backup to outweigh the decreasing potential of reconfiguration.

I understand your points and most companies today put PSTs in the central server for control and backup operation. But I see performance issues when you have too much users and PSTs in the server. There is tools to keep pst locally and backup pst to the server (incrementals)

Have you considered those users that are out of the office 95% of their time, and don't have broadband most of that time?

They're a minority of my users.

All laptop users have .OST caching set up by default. Some have local .PSTs and are responsible for backing up those archives themselves. Others are satisfied with the current data in the .OST when they're on the road, and opt to connect to and open their .PSTs manually when they have a broadband connection.

I appreciate your point that one size doesn't always fit all.

.

Can you access a .PST from OWA, so you can move messages, access archived ones, etc?

The way the Exchange administrator explained it to me; is that it all stayed on the exchange server and was backed up there. Strictly web-access, kind of like using hotmail.

Since it was server side, I assumed it used the same server backup data set type all Exchange servers use. I never bothered to learn. Sorry! I'm buried in so many varied technologies - I tend to jettison any information I don't need to memorize.

The message folders and structure looked just like it did on my Outlook 2003 at home, where I did have control over the storage of my email. Just looking at the GUI, I could hardly tell the difference. We could manipulate and organize them anyway we wanted to. I never tried to export/import anything on board the client's side hard drive. With HIPAA, that may have been a violation. We were tight with information on mobile or remote office clients.

a. Broadband is almost everywhere our people have to go. (and they can borrow mifi cards)
b. We don't have many mobile workers - just off hours workers
They can remote to their office desktop to access their archives.

I hope your laptops have HD encryption & remote wipe. pst's can hold a lot of proprietary & confidential information.

OST files are located in the machine (locally) not the server if you use exchange and enable cache mode. There is no need to backup the OST file. The OST is a cache data from Exchange just in case your mail server is down. When user open Outlook and exchange is not available, you will see previous emails and inbox data thanks to the OST.

You can download tools to convert OST to PST files too. I have extreme experience with PST files, I have about 3 Petabytes of PST files backed up in all kind of media (tapes, DVDs, blurays, etc) in my more than 20 years in IT.

The 2 GB limit used to be true, but with 2007 it wasn't as much of a problem and with 2010 it isn't a problem anymore.

That point is at best confusing. Yes, the messages are stored locally. A bit of a security issue, in my mind, since they then can be accessed by other people that have access to your computer. Yes, they are also stored on the server, if you are on an Exchange system. If you are using Outlook as your email client for your hotmail or gmail account then they probably, unless you changed settings, are downloaded to the local machine and then deleted from the server. Also, if people archive (.pst) to the local machine then the message disappears from the server and is no longer accessible online. This last one is the one that confuses more of my users than any other.

I store emails on verious subjects into folders that I have defined in Outlook. Periodically, I wish to export such folder to my local drive and remove them from Outlook. When I need to refer to these filed away messages, I want to be able to retrieve and display these in Outlook. To date, I have not been able to get any advice in how to do this. Can anyone help me?

Thank you.

Because I still get a lot of emails from Outlook users with attachments called winmail.dat.