
4 Dec 2019 by Mike Weaver
Inspire: Winning Hearts and Minds
Successful change management requires inspirational leadership. Here’s how to keep your team on track.
In the days before the cloud, PST files and public folders fulfilled a necessary requirement in allowing users to share data and collaborate with each other. Today, these technologies (first created in the 1990’s) can cause your business many headaches, especially if you’ve chosen to avoid SharePoint or other methods of collaboration platforms.
PST files used to allow users to take their data with them, they could store files on their laptops, or copy them to a CD/DVD or USB stick in order to work from home. This posed a security risk, as it could potentially grant data access to unauthorized people (if the USB disk or laptop is stolen or lost) or potentially cause data loss (CD/DVD breakage, hard disk failure, and so on).
Like PST files, Public Folders can also be misused as the concept allowed users to share more than just e-mail data. We’ve found Excel Spreadsheets, Word Documents, PowerPoint presentations and all kinds of other weird and wonderful items in Public Folders. This may not seem very relevant – however if you want to move out of the Public Folder estate to, for example, Office 365, it can become a problem as such file types may not be suitable to be stored in Exchange Online and would be better stored in a SharePoint document library, or similar.
To add to the complexity, many customers find that since they introduced an archiving solution such as Enterprise Vault into their IT infrastructure, placeholders or stubs find their way into both PST files and Public Folders. These need to be dealt with otherwise you will find that these will break when the files are moved, which is yet another issue to conquer if an infrastructure change for that old data is on the cards.
It’s very easy to ignore or underestimate these problems, but as we begin the New Year – a time that’s often associated with plans for improvement, change and even transformation – perhaps it’s time to apply the same kind of thinking to your IT strategy? What could you do better, and are there areas of your current IT infrastructure that could cause potential problems?
Quadrotech’s Public Folder transformation and PST eradication toolsets could help you gain a more thorough understanding of your estate:
Happy New Year! We look forward to discussing your projects with you.
Stefanie Elvers is a Presales and Service Delivery engineer at Quadrotech with extensive experience in the fields of archiving, messaging and information intelligence spanning the past 15 years. Stefanie has a certification from the IT Infrastructure Library.