PST’s not supported on the LAN…?

This is a new one on me - ‘Personal folder files are unsupported over a LAN or over a WAN link’.

“The .pst files are not meant to be a long-term, continuous-use method of storing messages in an enterprise environment. (!?!) The article also suggests two alternatives to .pst files. You can use .ost files or Microsoft Windows Terminal Services.”

And this blog is a year old but a useful read on the same subject: ‘Network Stored PST files ... don't do it!’

“…imagine if you had a couple of hundred users who each have two or three PST files.  These users have been with the company for a while, and they rarely (if ever!) delete their email from their PST files.  The files continue to grow in size - let's use an average of 1 GB as the size of the PST file.  Now consider that when each user launches Outlook, they make a request for two (or three) files, each of them being about 1 GB in size.  Then consider what happens when 200 users all launch Outlook around the same time when they get to work.  200 x 3 x 1 = 600 GB of data being requested at the same time.  That's an awful lot of Disk & Network I/O to process simultaneously.  This is a very common scenario - the file server "freezing" for a few minutes at a time while it tries to service these requests.”

Now I’m not saying I would have ever recommended this but I hadn’t come across this official, public information…