Outlook 2007 Update Adds Exchange Server 2010 Archiving Support

At the initial release of Exchange Server 2010 (RTM) a lot of Exchange administrators and customers were disappointed that Outlook 2007 would not support the new Exchange 2010 archiving feature.  Microsoft promised to add Exchange 2010 archive support to Outlook 2007 with a software update, and now they have finally delivered it.

The December 2010 Cumulative Update for Office 2007 adds support for Personal Archives to Outlook 2007 users who are connecting to Exchange Server 2010 mailboxes.

From the MS Exchange Team Blog:

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.

In the Exchange 2010 RTM timeframe, users could use Outlook 2010 or Outlook Web App (OWA) to access archive mailboxes. This update extends archive support to Outlook 2007.

Once the archive mailbox is visible in Outlook 2007, users can expand the folder hierarchy, and are able to perform the following operations:

• Move or copy messages and folders between their primary mailbox and the archive mailbox
• Move or copy messages and folders between a PST file and their archive mailbox (if access to PST files is not blocked by the administrator).
• Export or import messages to and from the archive mailbox
• Use Inbox Rules to automatically move messages to a folder in the archive mailbox

However the following limitations still exist for Outlook 2007 users and Exchange 2010 Personal Archives.

Outlook 2007 does not support the following functionality:

• Search across primary and archive mailboxes: When a user searches the primary mailbox, and selects All Mailbox Items, Outlook does not search the archive mailbox. Similarly, when the user searches the archive mailbox, the primary mailbox is not searched.
• Archive policies: In Outlook 2007, users can’t use personal tags (also known as archive policies) to move items to the archive mailbox. Any default archive policies for the mailbox continue to be applied. Users can use Outlook Web App to see or apply archive policies.