Outlook Archiving
I always get several question related to users mailbox sizes and how to fix this without too much trouble for the Support team or the administrators team. most of the questions I get are like
- my users don’t archive and I don’t know what to do. exchange storage is running out
- I need to implement a quota on my exchange .
- I inherited exchange from old administrator and he did not apply any quota limits .
- I will be migrating exchange soon and I need to make smaller database .
- some inboxes are huge in exchange database .
- how to reduce the exchange database size .
all above question have two ways of solving it
- administrator side
- user side
so my advice start with the user side and move to the admin side later ( database defragment ,deletion settings…etc. )
I will be using outlook 2010 in this guide but the same concept apply to any office version
this is the typical outlook view that we will be working on
next we download Office 2010 Administrative Template files from
we create a group of users in active directory
next step we extract the office templates
we open group policy management console and create a new GPO
we change the security filtering on it from authenticated users to our create group
next we edit the GPO go to user section and import the ADM file
we can import all the adm files but we will be only needing the outlook adm file .I also like to import the main office adm file
now we go under user >administrative templates > classic > Microsoft outlook > outlook options > other
this option will force outlook to empty the trash when it exits ( it will take a bit longer when its shutting down )
now we go under user >administrative templates > classic > Microsoft outlook > outlook options > other > auto archive
this is way too aggressive so before you make you archiving only massages older than 5 days I recommend you start with 12 month and work your way down
now add all the needed users in the created group and you done 
one of the nice things out this that its is a background process so the user well feel only a load on the machine and it will follow the same tree as the one created by the user in his mailbox
this is the final results
