PST Auditing and Reporting

Do you love managing all those PSTs in your Microsoft Exchange Server environment? Or are you like the majority of the civilized world (of IT pros) in that PSTs are a never-ending nuisance destined to send you to early retirement with an uncontrollable twitching somewhere around your left eye? If you fit into this latter category, perhaps it's time to consider a third-party add-on to help manage those pesky PSTs.

AddOnMail, a software developer specializing in solutions for Microsoft Office Outlook, has just released PSTStation Corporate 3.0, an Outlook plug-in that automatically detects PSTs and can apply actions to them such as compression and back up. New in the 3.0 release is the ability to spot PSTs on company workstations and servers. PSTStation Corporate also detects empty, orphaned, and renamed files, and it can determine who the original owner of those files was.

The Report Center gives you a graphical view of what's going on with PSTs in your environment. You can view predefined reports or design custom reports. Backups can be performed incrementally—adding just new messages—so you don't have to back up the whole PST each time, and you can even run backups while the PST is open.

Exchange Server 2010 introduces email archiving for the first time directly as part of Exchange. One of the key benefits of this move by Microsoft is that it provides a legitimate alternative to PSTs. However, clearly not everyone will be able to make the move to Exchange 2010 right away, and you might still have to deal with PSTs that already exist in your environment. PSTStation Corporate 3.0 might be a sanity preserver for you in such cases. For pricing and additional information, visit AddOnMail's website.

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