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Our Requirements for a PST Importer Program
RobertGreenlee
Posts: 2
We are in the process of a project to import all PSTs for out 2500+ users in to the new Personal Archive Folders of Exchange 2010. I did a quick demo but I found it lacking in many ways so I wanted to list out our requirements to see if its something you can work with. I know you can do some of these things but many important ones are missing.
1. Discover all PSTs on both File servers and user workstations - Really don't like the agent based discovery since we'd have to deploy it to 2000 desktops
2. Identify seperately PSTs that are mounted to Outlook currently to those that are present but unmounted.
3. Identify who is using the PST
4. When the Import process is kicked off remove the PST from the users Outlook profile, then copy/move it to the staging area.
5. Collaborate results from PSTs discovered on file servers to PSTs mounted on users PCs pointing to those file server based PSTs.
6. Import the PST in to the new Archive store (Don't see a option today to do that) in to a sub-folder with the same Display Name the users had on the PST. (I only see a option to use file name).
Some other thoughts. Since you do use a remote agent can it do anything like compress the PST as it copies across the wire. We have many users in remote offices over WAN links.
Are you guys workign on future versions to fix these shortcomings?
Thanks
Robert
1. Discover all PSTs on both File servers and user workstations - Really don't like the agent based discovery since we'd have to deploy it to 2000 desktops
2. Identify seperately PSTs that are mounted to Outlook currently to those that are present but unmounted.
3. Identify who is using the PST
4. When the Import process is kicked off remove the PST from the users Outlook profile, then copy/move it to the staging area.
5. Collaborate results from PSTs discovered on file servers to PSTs mounted on users PCs pointing to those file server based PSTs.
6. Import the PST in to the new Archive store (Don't see a option today to do that) in to a sub-folder with the same Display Name the users had on the PST. (I only see a option to use file name).
Some other thoughts. Since you do use a remote agent can it do anything like compress the PST as it copies across the wire. We have many users in remote offices over WAN links.
Are you guys workign on future versions to fix these shortcomings?
Thanks
Robert
Comments
Sorry for the delay in replying to you on this. There isn’t a short answer to all your points below: some of it is planned for a release that’s right around the corner, some of it is already possible, and some of it we aren’t likely to do in the very near term. So point-by-point….
1. Discover all PSTs on both File servers and user workstations - Really don't like the agent based discovery since we'd have to deploy it to 2000 desktops
It is possible today to search network shares with the software. There are certainly good and bad things about an agent-based search, and we had to come down on one side. Avoiding firewall issues and not having to serialize the search on the administrative machine were a couple of the reasons we did make that choice.
2. Identify seperately PSTs that are mounted to Outlook currently to those that are present but unmounted.
3. Identify who is using the PST
This functionality was in pre-release versions of the product, but we had to remove it after it repeatedly performed very badly in usability tests. We tried a few different ways to present the user profile information as part of the search results, but we never encountered a user who made sense or use of it. Clearly, we can revisit that decision if you users tell us we were wrong.
4. When the Import process is kicked off remove the PST from the users Outlook profile, then copy/move it to the staging area.
The main difficulty here is doing anything that affects a user’s Outlook session if Outlook is open (an unfortunately common scenario). The best solution we know would be to put something in place so that this can occur when the user next closes Outlook. Synchronizing the import and removal is a need we are aware of, but we are not likely to ship a product with a built-in solution to this in the near future.
5. Collaborate results from PSTs discovered on file servers to PSTs mounted on users PCs pointing to those file server based PSTs.
6. Import the PST in to the new Archive store (Don't see a option today to do that) in to a sub-folder with the same Display Name the users had on the PST. (I only see a option to use file name).
We expect to ship a version that imports directly into the archive mailbox shortly as a v1.1. Also, despite the option having the text ‘file name’ for the folder name, we do actually use the display name, which makes much more sense!
Some other thoughts. Since you do use a remote agent can it do anything like compress the PST as it copies across the wire. We have many users in remote offices over WAN links.
The PST file is compressed over the wire. If you want any more details on that or anything else I’ve mentioned, please let us know.
Thanks again for the feedback, and I hope that this glimpse into future capabilities helps with your planning!
Elizabeth Ayer
Exchange Product Manager
Product Manager
Red Gate Software Ltd