Annemarie Toth-Waddell asked -

"Lastly, I know staff are interested in archiving their e-mail.  Does
anyone have any tips on how this can best be done using MS Outlook?
When you choose to auto archive, I believe the archive ends up on your
c: drive which isn't a safe place to store files.  I'm concerned though
that if we tell staff to archive to a network server, we will end up
overloading the servers with useless records."

Annemarie,
I will address the issue of email archiving which I consider to be akin
to allowing people to store their records haphazardly without
supervision in the basement.

We have allowed our users to use the Outlook archive feature and have
lived to regret it.  A large amount of our network storage is devoted to
.pst files.  Part of the reason the .pst files are so big is a)
many/most people do not actively manage their email and operate under
the theory that they may "need" some of this stuff and never look at it
again b)when a message is archived, it is saved in a .msg format which
makes it balloon in size.

I get a report every day marking the growth of our network storage and
another related report on large files - and guess what, the large files
have a high percentage of .psts!!

Also, when a message is in the Outlook store, it is stored as a "single
instance" even if several people got the same message (or so my Outlook
guru tells me).  Once it is archived, the one message may exist multiple
times in multiple archives - again wasting storage space on possibly
valueless information.

We are considering outlawing the use of .pst files unless they ARE on a
users local drive.  This would be coupled with procedures for making
sure that RECORDS that are in email are handled appropriately and we
have not finalized our plan.

Whew, you turned my switch with your question!!

Mary Hilliard
Records Management Officer
University of Texas System

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