Artisan Mailbox Management and Microsoft Outlook

Outlook is the premier Exchange client tool and, naturally, ArtiSan supports its use in the corporate environment. In the simplest use of ArtiSan (where there is no stubbing of mailbox content) Outlook and OWA users can continue there normal behaviour unaware that their mailbox content has been archived.

In more sophisticated environments, ArtiSan can be configured through rules to “stub” the mailbox content as it archives the items (or at some period after archiving to allow for backups to be taken). Stubbing the content of dated mailbox items can significantly reduce the amount of storage required within the Exchange store, giving benefits such as optimising mailbox quotas and limiting the exponential growth of the store. A stubbed message simply acts as a placeholder for the original content of the mail which is now held in the archive. The image below shows an example of a stub.

End-Users simply click links within the stub to view the content. Stubs may optionally have the attachment links embedded in the content. Embedding the attachment links makes the stub slightly larger, but has the benefit of maintaining the attachment flag in the Outlook explorer and allows users to open the attachment directly from the Outlook UI.

An optional add-in is also supplied with ArtiSan. Its main purpose is to allow administrators and information officers to do ad-hoc requests to archive or restore individual items with a mailbox. The add-in appears as a new toolbar within Outlook.