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Work in our company is organized by project, each of which has a folder somewhere on the network.

When project managers have official emails that need to be filed with the project, they setup a PST data file in the project folder and dump emails to it. That way all emails pertaining to that project are centrally filed and can be accessed by other people.

This means users can have lots of data files showing up in their Outlook.

As a result, if we want to refresh a workstation we need to add dozens of project data files back into Outlook manually.

I was hoping for a way to export the list of data files Outlook is attached to and then import it at a new Outlook.

Is there a configuration file in the Outlook profile that can be copied to a new profile? Any suggestions on making it a less painful process would be appreciated.

Outlook account settings

user78150
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    This is not relevant to your actual question, but I should point out - PSTs are NOTORIOUSLY hard to backup properly, especially when opened in Outlook. I would look long and hard at whether your backups of those mission critical files are actually good. – Driftpeasant Dec 09 '11 at 23:23

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Storing PST files on a shared drive is a bad idea - you can't have multiple people accessing it at once and MicroSoft recommends against it.

The first idea that comes to mind is to kill two birds with one stone: when someone needs to save a message, just save that message to a network location. When the project is wrapped up, you already have a nice archive of all relevant messages. The simplest way to keep them organized would be to name the saved messages with the date (and time) they were received.

Or, if you need/want access to the messages from within Outlook while the project is in progress, why not create an account and mailbox for the project and give the appropriate people access to it? Or put the project manager in charge of collecting all relevant messages, and have them keep them in a folder that they share with the rest of the team. If a team member gets a new PC, all they have to do is open the shared project folders they have access to.

Ward - Reinstate Monica
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As far as I know, the only thing that can do profile customization is the PRF file, but looking at the documentation for it, it does not show a section for mapping extra data files. You may be out of luck.

Driftpeasant
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IMHO I hope you won't need this stuff forever as you are playing with fire. With multiple clients connecting and disconecting to these stores I expect the data to be binary gibberish in no time. If you need to refresh settings on a workstation use either USMT or for limited use use the easy transfer wizard. Either one will migrate office settings.

Jim B
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