Microsoft Records Management Team Blog

@Recordkeeper:

When asked, 80% of our survey respondents stated that moving/filing e-mail into managed folders from psts, where it has accumulated, often for years, is a pain.  Most e-mail “dumped to” or moved to psts is often not organized in a way to easily determine what is needed and what is not. Many times users just take the larges items or a chunk of e-mail and move it to a pst to get below a quota limit.  Thus, when asked to move data from psts back into their mailbox in an organized way, it takes a lot of time and effort. It’s sort of like taking time to organize and clean up a garage that has been cluttered for years – it’s a major pain point.  Instead, we now recommend leaving psts in place, as read only (meaning they can be used, but nothing can be added), and ask folks to move things out as they use them.

As for the “no pain point” items – we thought those would show as pain points, but survey data at the time did not show them as pain points.  As we have more users on the system, the productivity impact seems to stem primarily from pilers, who prefer working out of their inbox and not file anything. Filers, after the initial conversion, don’t seem to have any issues or increased effort to file their e-mail.

Hope this helps.

Tina Torres