Outlook 2007 Update for Exchange 2010 Personal Archive Support

I have used Outlook 2010 to play around with Exchange 2010 Personal Archives but never Outlook 2007.

As most of you know, Outlook 2007 doesn’t support these by default. However, an update released last January (KB2412171) brings archives to Outlook 2007! However, not completely so support is limited...

After you download and install the update (you don’t need to restart you PC, just close and reopen Outlook), your archive will appear automatically (please see note below) and you will be able to do the following:

• Copy/move messages between your primary mailbox and your archive;
• Copy/move messages between any PST open in Outlook and your archive.

NOTE: if you have full access permissions to another mailbox or archive, these will automatically show up in your Outlook view! This is known as auto-mapping in Outlook 2010 and uses the msExchDelegateListLink AD attribute together with AutoDiscover to achieve this.

However, here’s what you will not be able to do:

• Search across your primary and archive mailboxes at once, only separately;
• Use Personal Tags to override Retention and Archiving Policies set up, if any, on your Exchange 2010 environment.

As this update is now somewhat old, I was expecting for these 2 issues to have been already addressed in another hotfix. However, I was unable to find anything related to this... So, as far as I know, this is still the latest functionality available for Outlook 2007 users.

Don’t forget that the archive is only accessible when you are connected to Exchange as it is never cached locally even when on cached mode.