How do you persuade users to abandon their personal folders?

Posted by thing2k on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by thing2k
Published on 2011-02-13T11:19:53Z Indexed on 2011/02/13 15:27 UTC
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Filed under:

outlook

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archiving

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e-mail

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mimecast

Towards the end of last year we started using Mimecast services, in particular their cloud base e-mail archiving. Since then we’ve been rolling out the Mimecast Services for Outlook (MSO) Add-in.

We’ve informed the users that we will be give them training in the next few Months, and we do not require them to use it, but my boss stated that we are getting rid of Personal Folders (pst files), by putting them into Mimecast. Unsurprisingly this did cause something of a backlash. Though really who likes change.

I know the IT reasons for getting rid of Personal Folders (inefficient, unreliable, single access, etc), but from an average user’s perspective, unless they have had one fail on them, they see them as simple and only way to archive e-mail when their 200Mb mailbox is full.

So what can I say to the users, to get them to understand why Personal Folders are not the best solution?

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