Outlook Archive (pst) Block

[NealIV]

I may be mistaken but I thought that there was a MCX setting or something that disabled Outlook archives from being created. We are letting users know that we will not be allowing them to archive emails locally on their Macs, but I need to enforce this somehow. How would you approach this?

[talkingmoose]

Outlook for Mac doesn't support using PST files other than importing them and doesn't have any sort of archive feature.

Users can always copy messages to their Desktop and to the folders under "On My Computer" within Outlook, which is local storage. If someone loses his drive then he loses those messages. No MCX setting will prevent copying messages.

If you're in an environment with an Information Rights Management (IRM) server then you can restrict things like printing, forwarding, etc. It may be able to prevent copying messages elsewhere. I'm not sure.

[WiseByte]

Hi NealIV,

Are you still needing this functionality? I see the post is back in 2012, but we are dealing with the same issue for Outlook 2016. We want to disable the ability for people to store their email locally. Have you guys came up with a solution?

Our solution is:
1. locate people we have "On My Computer" enabled
2. give people instructions on how to migrate their email from local storage to Cloud and how to disable local storage
3. disable the local storage option going forward

[talkingmoose]

Today, there's still no way to block a user from exporting to an Outlook .olm archive file.

I've heard this method to block saving messages to "On My Computer" folders works well:
https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/20028/preventing-users-from-using-outlook-local-folders...

If found this UserVoice.com feature request to block exporting to archives, but it doesn't seem to be getting very many votes. More votes means higher priority from Microsoft.

https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/335538-outlook-for-mac-business/suggestions/17486485-block-abil...