Hi Some of our users in the HR department share a mailbox. Job applications go to this mailbox. We increased the mailbox quota of that mailbox but it's getting too full and we now need to look to archiving some of these messages. We can't use a PST file since multiple users access the mailbox. Public Folders are being deprecated I hear, so that's another one out. We were thinking of either Sharepoint or creating a file share for them so they could just save the Outlook files on there. Unfortunately, we can't afford an email archiving solution like Vault. I had some questions: i) If we go down the network share route, is it possible for Outlook to hook into this share? Or would they need to navigate to the share via Explorer and open the Outlook file? ii) Are there any benefits to storing the file on Sharepoint in terms of compression, etc iii) Are there any other solutions we can think of? iv) What solutions are there in Sharepoint? I have heard of document libraries, but doesn't the doc library actually have its own email address? We don't want mails to go straight to Sharepoint, we want the mails to Exchange/Outlook and then users can manually move messages to the archive themselves

Hello, SharePoint can be a good solution for you here. 1. SharePoint objects can be manipulated in Outlook 2007, so your users can subscribe to a document library to hold these emails. They will show up in the Folder List as SharePoint Libraries. In your document library, just click Actions, then Connect to Outlook and the library will be available in Outlook. Users can drag items to the library in Outlook 2007. 2. There is no native compression in SharePoint, but you probably have your SharePoint on cheaper disk than your Exchange environment. There are external storage provider options available for SharePoint if you want to use a file share instead of the SharePoint database for storage. You can write your own solution, or buy one like StoragePoint: http://www.storagepoint.com/ There may be compression available with some of these solutions. The huge benefit to storing on SharePoint is that it gives you full text search and you can control things such as retention (you may have a requirement to hold job applications for a year, or maybe more). 3. There are other solutions. You can eliminate the quota on the mailbox being used if you can afford the space and set retention to remove old items. Or if you go to Exchange 2010 you can use the personal archive feature to reduce the size of the mailbox but still allow the archive to be shared easily. There are certainly other solutions as well. 4. Document libraries can be mail enabled but don't have to be. If you have Outlook 2007, the users can literally drag emails into the document library via the Outlook interface. Check out this blog post about Outlook integration with document libraries: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2007/09/28/sharepoint-outlook-the-perfect-link.aspx

Perfect, thanks!