Exchange Server 2010 Archive Support in Outlook 2007

  Ahead of December 2010, taking advantage of the archiving and retention features built by default into Exchange Server 2010 meant that customers had to be running Office Outlook 2010.

This is no longer the case, as the Redmond company released the December 2010 Cumulative Update for Office 2007, extending archive support to Outlook 2007 as well.

This means that companies running Outlook 2010, Outlook Web App (OWA) and Outlook 2007 can allow their workers to access archive mailboxes, provided that the December 2010 Cumulative Update has been installed.

“Exchange 2010 includes Personal Archives, a feature designed to help you reduce the risks from PST files and reduce the costs of discovery.

“Organizations can provision archive mailboxes for their users, allowing them to store older e-mail that's accessed less frequently in the archive.

“From the user's perspective, archive mailbox behaves like a PST file, minus the file management overhead and risks of a PST file,” explained Bharat Suneja, a Senior Technical Writer in the Exchange User Education team.

As long as an archive mailbox has been provisioned for an account, the user will be able to connect to the archive mailbox. The email client makes use of the Autodiscover service in order to grab the needed data.

As long as the user is connected to the Exchange server, the Outlook 2007 and later will be able to obtain information on the archive mailbox.

“In Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007, users can access archive mailboxes only when they're connected to the Exchange server.

“The connection can be an RPC (over TCP) connection, or Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC over HTTP). Even if the Outlook profile is configured to use Cached Exchange Mode, the archive mailbox is never cached locally to the user's computer.

“When the user is no longer connected to Exchange, the archive mailbox becomes inaccessible. The locally cached primary mailbox remains accessible if using Cached Exchange Mode,” Suneja added.