On Sun, 22 Nov 2009, Jerry wrote:
Of course this only applies to Microsoft Office 2010, a BETA of which is available at:
I am very happy to know that Microsft acknowledged at dawn of 2010 that the limitation of personal storage is pointless.
The original PST specifications were developed when nobody had ever heard of a 'gig' of storage. It probably made sense then. In today's environment, it is indeed obsolete. From what I have read, Microsoft has totally revamped the PST format. In fact, they are suppose to be releasing the specs for it when Office 2010 is officially released.
It might be just me, but I can't read the 'revamp' thing in the article you link to. It just talks about how wonderful it is that they are going to put the format under their (IMNSHO pretty bad) Open Specification promise. The reason for doing that is clearly selfish: by allowing others to do something with the currently proprietary PST files, they wouldn't have to fear loosing the market to competitor's desktop products. What they SHOULD have done, was open up their MAPI protocol, to allow other back-end programs to talk to Outlook in a way that Outlook understands. Now THAT would be helping interoperability.
[Of course, one could argue that they should make Outlook conform to standards instead, but since they never showed any interest in conforming to standards with any product, that would be naive. Even with Vista's Windows Mail they adopted something "almost but not quite entirely unlike" Maildir format. Still better than PST, true..]
Having said that.. IMAP support in Outlook sure has improved from 2003 to 2007. It just has a looooong way to go. Using Outlook 2007 in a network environment with IMAP breaks every time a user logs in to another workstation. It took me a while to find a workaround, and it's still not entirely stable. But at least now that I moved the Outlook.pst and Outlookuser@servername-000002.pst to a samba share, it is useable. Still puzzled as to why they decided to store those in de LocalSettings instead of in the normal user profile or a standard network share...
-- Maarten