Microsoft said today that it plans to open up the PST data format commonly used within Outlook.In a MSDN blog posting, Paul Lorimer, Group Manager of Microsoft Office Interoperability, confirmed Microsoft want to improve platform-independent access to email, calendar, contacts, and other data generated by Microsoft Outlook. The PST format is used to store data ranging from email to calendar and contacts and allows for users to export and import that data within Microsoft Outlook.
According to Lorimer: "In order to facilitate interoperability and enable customers and vendors to access the data in .pst files on a variety of platforms, we will be releasing documentation for the .pst file format. This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice. The technical documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications. It also will highlight the structure of the .pst file, provide details like how to navigate the folder hierarchy, and explain how to access the individual data objects and properties."
Microsoft says the documentation is still being worked on and is in its "early stages". With an Office 2010 public beta due next month it's reasonable to assume we will hear a lot more about Office 2010 in general at next months Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Allowing the PST format to be documented and open will allow web mail providers like Gmail and social networking sites like Facebook to better import data from Microsoft's Outlook application.
I had that setup for a couple users by accident on a SBS 2003 box and it worked
Because exchange servers come crippled unless you pay a lot of $$$ in licensing to Microsoft to make the email inboxes larger. As it is now, I HAVE to move all my exchange server emails to a .pst "archive" folder yearly or else my exchange email inbox will fill up. Doesn't help that I get 5-10MB attachments in my emails daily.
The licensing limitation was explained to me be our IT department. I thought it was silly, especially coming from a Linux server background. One thing I've learned, however, is to not be a problem for IT. So I don't fight it. The archive files work fine and are completely searchable. I have them on my laptop and on our fileserver for backup.
I answered the one above but something went wrong... He said he wanted to hook up owa with pst and that would of course require an exchange server.
Further on... There's no license that covers the size of the users mailbox. The IT department that told its users so are lying. Exchange 2003 had a limit on 16gb for the database but that can be changed with a registry value. Exchange 2007 have much much higher limits on the database size.
The licensing limitation was explained to me be our IT department. I thought it was silly, especially coming from a Linux server background. One thing I've learned, however, is to not be a problem for IT. So I don't fight it. The archive files work fine and are completely searchable. I have them on my laptop and on our fileserver for backup.
Unless you have exchange 5.5 or older, your IT department must be lying. The size of each users mailbox can be set by the exchange admins and no licence model restrics the size that a users maibox can be.
The licensing limitation was explained to me be our IT department. I thought it was silly, especially coming from a Linux server background. One thing I've learned, however, is to not be a problem for IT. So I don't fight it. The archive files work fine and are completely searchable. I have them on my laptop and on our fileserver for backup.
I don't think theres any license model that restricts the size of each inbox...your it department sets it depending on hardware
The licensing limitation was explained to me be our IT department. I thought it was silly, especially coming from a Linux server background. One thing I've learned, however, is to not be a problem for IT. So I don't fight it. The archive files work fine and are completely searchable. I have them on my laptop and on our fileserver for backup.
I agree with the other posts. I'm an Exchange consultant and I can tell you that there are no licensing restrictions on mailbox sizes. There USED to be an information store size limit of 16GB but Microsoft lifted that with a service pack and registry entry. Now the information store limit is 75GB I believe. Past that you would have to step up in version to create additional storage groups or increase the information store size. I don't normally see these limits imposed at all but the largest cheapest companies considering how cheap storage is now-a-days.
I probably won't push the issue though. I've learned to choose my battles. This is one of those things where my email works, I have a simple way with dealing with the limitation forced on me by IT, and therefore don't have any real issues.
I probably won't push the issue though. I've learned to choose my battles. This is one of those things where my email works, I have a simple way with dealing with the limitation forced on me by IT, and therefore don't have any real issues.
It's easily expandable with just a registry value if you have Exchange 2003 with SP2, so there's no excuse for those lazy administrators
The licensing limitation was explained to me be our IT department. I thought it was silly, especially coming from a Linux server background. One thing I've learned, however, is to not be a problem for IT. So I don't fight it. The archive files work fine and are completely searchable. I have them on my laptop and on our fileserver for backup.
I agree with the other posts. I'm an Exchange consultant and I can tell you that there are no licensing restrictions on mailbox sizes. There USED to be an information store size limit of 16GB but Microsoft lifted that with a service pack and registry entry. Now the information store limit is 75GB I believe. Past that you would have to step up in version to create additional storage groups or increase the information store size. I don't normally see these limits imposed at all but the largest cheapest companies considering how cheap storage is now-a-days.
I was thinking that exact same thing but did a search before I responded and was stunned when I found out Exchange 2007 Standard's mailbox limit is 50GB http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997432.aspx
Thanks Shadrack for the info
The licensing limitation was explained to me be our IT department. I thought it was silly, especially coming from a Linux server background. One thing I've learned, however, is to not be a problem for IT. So I don't fight it. The archive files work fine and are completely searchable. I have them on my laptop and on our fileserver for backup.
I agree with the other posts. I'm an Exchange consultant and I can tell you that there are no licensing restrictions on mailbox sizes. There USED to be an information store size limit of 16GB but Microsoft lifted that with a service pack and registry entry. Now the information store limit is 75GB I believe. Past that you would have to step up in version to create additional storage groups or increase the information store size. I don't normally see these limits imposed at all but the largest cheapest companies considering how cheap storage is now-a-days.
I was thinking that exact same thing but did a search before I responded and was stunned when I found out Exchange 2007 Standard's mailbox limit is 50GB http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997432.aspx
Thanks Shadrack for the info
from the technet article:
The Exchange Server 2007 Standard Edition hard coded licensing database size limit of 50 GB can also be increased by creating the Database Size Limit in Gb registry value.
Yes they are probably just lazy. Oh well *sigh*.
You do know that outlook caches the Exchange mailbox on the local computer in .pst format right?
BTW - how in the hell did those other developers ever get access to PST files? I never figured that part out either. My guess is that they were former Microsoft employees that had some sort of inside knowledge on the inner workings of PST files and JET storage (which I think the PST files use).
+1
BTW - how in the hell did those other developers ever get access to PST files? I never figured that part out either. My guess is that they were former Microsoft employees that had some sort of inside knowledge on the inner workings of PST files and JET storage (which I think the PST files use).
reverse engineering, patience and lots and lots of coffee
I thought it would be SharePoint
Hrm...we have Sharepoint here and no one likes it or uses it.
Either case it's still a good thing.
gmail for my domain for the usual cloud access and archiving my email in a shared local directories.
thunderbird stores in separate files for each folder in the archive, therefore its happy unless to people enter the same folder.
ok for small business
unlike outlook where its all in one pst.
http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/expor...st-backup/1938/
You'd have to pick which account gets what setting synced to it for everything.
Why not do the simple and much much better solution of making seperate profiles for them?
Because I'm monitoring few customers accounts (usually we get an exchange account on the customer's server) plus I have a company's exchange server. OWA isn't really the option, IMAP too (almost always an exchange server is accessible over OWA only - http passthrough)
Maybe if you don't already have Outlook installed, I suppose, but then parsing a PST directly is going to be way more error-prone than just using the existing API.
I expect to see a lot of tools that will be corrupting PSTs in the future, at least initially...
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.