Any advice for importing PST files and reducing space used by shortcuts please (but keeping it simple for new EV users)?

[BruGuy]

Hello,

We're migrating a few thousand users to Exchange from a third-party mailsystem.

As part of the migration, we'll need to export mailboxes to PST files and import them into EV using EVPM. Many of the PST files will be several GB in size and contain upto 20,000 messages. Our users will be new to using EV so we want to create shortcuts in Outlook to make EV practically transparent.

There are two problems to that:
1. Each shortcut seems to take about 4KB so that means a large proportion of our users' Exchange mailbox quota will be taken up just by EV shortcuts;
2. regardless of the date on the message, EV sees all messages which are imported from PST files as being new (same modified date). So we can't implement a policy to delete shortcuts based on message age because it would be meaningless for the imported messages.

Can anyone offer any solutions to these problems please? We need to keep it transparent for the users and reduce support calls.

Right now, it looks like we'll need to forget about creating shortcuts for the PST messages and get users to use the archive explorer for their old messages. Is there a way to map the archive explorer onto a folder (e.g., "old messages") in Outlook's folder list? Pressing a button to launcht he archive explorer isn't intuitive.

Thanks in advance for any advice,

- Alan.

[Wayne_Humphrey]

There is nothing you can do regarding pushing up the users quota, the way i would do it is disable quotas for the migration, import the pst,s.

If you have any programing knowledge, or know anyone who does write a small application to trawl the mailbox for IPM.NOTE.EnterpriseVault and if the item is received > date set, then delete therefore not needing to expire on modified date.

--wayne

[John_Chisari]

 I wouldn't create shortcuts - but give them access to Archive Explorer.

Yes you can map a Folder to the archive explorer webpage - and I seem to recall that you can do this with EVPM.

You can create the folder using EVPM - and I think you can set the HomePage property on the folder - I just don't have the utlities guide handy at the moment.

[John_Chisari · Accepted solution]

So got the guide out now.. you would create a EVPM script similar to this - it will Create a folder called Old Messages with the URL pointing to Archive Explorer.

[Directory]
directorycomputername = myserver
sitename = SiteName

[Mailbox]
distinguishedname = all

[Folder]
name = \Old Messages
URL=http://evservername.com/enterprisevault/archiveexplorerui.asp

Hope that helps.

John