How many ways can Outlook archive an item?

In January, I spoke with Javier Soltero, the new General Manager of the Outlook development group, about his plans, hopes, and aspirations for revitalizing the Outlook client family, including Outlook desktop. Javier said that “his team is in the middle of reviewing every feature in the current client to ask the question whether the feature does make email better.” However, I’m not sure that Outlook now boasts a “Archive” button is quite what he meant. Adding the ability to include animated GIFs in Outlook.com also seems to be in the doubtful category.

To return to the topic of archives, Outlook desktop has sported an archive (or auto-archive) option for quite some time. That option moves items to a PST to reduce the overall size of a mailbox. It’s a useful option for people who use Outlook to connect to non-Exchange servers (like Gmail) and want to retain a local copy of messages.

However, ever since the advent of archive mailboxes and retention policies that can automatically move items into archive mailboxes in Exchange 2010, the auto-archive feature could be regarded to be a tad archaic. Indeed, if your mailbox is enabled with an archive, Outlook won’t let you use auto-archive, which is the way things should be as PSTs should be avoided whenever possible.

Microsoft announced Outlook's new archive feature in a February 25 blog as:

“We’re also introducing an Archive capability in Outlook 2016 that lets you quickly move messages out of your inbox and into another folder. This will allow you to triage your inbox with an experience similar to archiving in other email services like Outlook.com. Archive is rolling out to Outlook 2016, coming soon for Outlook for Mac, and available today in Outlook on iOS, Android and the web.”

The feature is available to users even if their mailbox is archive-enabled, is available in Outlook Web App and is showing up in preview builds of Outlook 2016 desktop clients (16.0.6528.1007 is one such build). For both clients, you first select a folder in your mailbox as the destination for archive item or use a folder called “Archive”, which Outlook will create if necessary. Thereafter, if you elect to archive items, they are moved to the selected folder.

All of which is fine and dandy if it weren’t for the salient fact that Outlook clients already possess the Move option, which essentially does the same job. True, you have to select a target folder for the move, but Outlook desktop supports the ability to create a “quickstep” that can move items to a specific folder. In short, the quickstep does exactly what the new Archive feature does. It’s even “one-click archiving” as per the description for Outlook desktop.

So we have a new feature that duplicates existing functionality and has the same name as another feature that works in a totally different manner. Cue user confusion?

But it’s actually even worse because users might be lured into a false sense of security that they can use the feature to archive and preserve items. All the archive feature does is to move items to a folder. It does not stamp the moved items with a retention tag to prevent the Managed Folder Assistant applying a default delete or default archive tag on the items, meaning that it is quite possible that the items will be deleted or moved to an archive mailbox to meet the requirements of a retention policy. Cue further user confusion as items “disappear” from their archive folder.

Adding options to clients that automate common tasks (which I believe this to be an attempt to do) is all well and good, but it has to be done in the context of existing user behavior and the servers to which the clients connect. It’s all very well making new functionality available that addresses a perceived need for individual users but it’s not good when that functionality might affect user helpdesks as well as organizational compliance strategies.

Perhaps this change was in flight before the new management regime reached the Outlook group and it is not indicative of what they plan to do in the future. I hope that’s the case. I really do. Outlook is too important a tool to be messed with in this manner.

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