I've successfully set up and deployed two Linux Samba PDC's to different
locations over the past couple weeks, but have a question regarding the
location of the Outlook personal folders file(s) of outlook.pst and
archive.pst.
Currently, they are in:
c:\documents and settings\<user>\local settings\application
data\microsoft\outlook
But, the local settings folder doesn't save to the roving profile on the
PDC, which makes this a bad location because:
1) the outlook.pst and archive.pst won't be included in the nightly tape
backup
2) the user can't login at a different machine and get their outlook
settings.
I see two options:
1) move the .pst files out of local settings and into:
c:\documents and settings\<user>\application data\microsoft\outlook
which would save them to the user's roving profile in the PDC when the
user logs off, and update from the PDC when the user logs on. This would
satisfy the backup scenario, and would get local copies of the .pst
files from the PDC, but I'm concerned about what would happen if the
user logged in at a second machine before logging off at the first:
they'd have parallel .pst files and only one of these would end up saved
to the PDC. I think. I may be trying to be too smart about this:
Microsoft certainly has thought about these issues and perhaps it'll
"just work".
2) move the .pst files into the user's home directory on the PDC, so
that outlook is accessing them over the network and not locally. This
satisfies the backup scenario and also fixes the overcopying concern, but:
a) are the .pst files multi-user capable? I ask this because it is
possible that a user will have Outlook running on one machine, then go
to a different machine, log in again, and start Outlook again. They
didn't mean to open a shared .pst, but there you go it happened anyway.
b) will performance suffer by not having the .pst files local?
Any input would be welcome. Unfortunately by the time I got to them this
company is too entrenched in Outlook to pull them out at this point. All
I can do is make it as useful and safe as I can. Each user's
outlook.pst/archive.pst combo is between 100 and 400 MB in size.
I did try searching the KB but Microsoft seems to be making the KB less
and less useful every time I visit it.
--
Paul McNett - http://paulmcnett.com
vcard: http://paulmcnett.com/pm.vcf
©2004 Paul McNett |
