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Duet and Archiving

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The archiving feature in Duet was designed with several goals in mind

  • To reduce the size of the mailbox in Exchange
  • To attempt to minimize the scenario where Duet sends false “Deletes” to the SAP Backend
  • To prevent false “Creates” if archive items are restored

Many organizations have their own 3rd party archiving solution in place which can have some unwanted effects on Duet items. For example say your have an item in your calendar that is being tracked by Duet and your 3rd party archiving solution archives the item. Once the item is removed Duet will see this as a delete and the client will send an unwanted delete to the SAP backend. Now say you restore that item sometime in the future, Duet will see this as a create and send an unwanted create to the SAP backend.

The built in archiving solution that is built into Duet was designed with the hopes of working in conjunction with your 3rd party archiving solution but only focusing on Duet items. In theory, if Duet’s archiving is configured to run before your 3rd party archiving solution runs then everything should work great. Duet items get archived to a PST and Duet tracks them accordingly, not sending the unintentional deletes to the backend; and if the item is restored it doesn’t send the unwanted creates. When your 3rd party archiving solution kicks in later it doesn’t know that Duet items need to be archived since they are not in your mailbox.

However some organizations don’t allow PSTs and thus want to disable Duet’s archiving. Currently completely disabling Duet’s archiving functionality is not possible. Only disabling Duet’s auto archiving functionality can be done by the Duet user on the Duet client. Microsoft is aware if this limitation and is currently developing options to completely disable all of Duet’s built in archiving features. This will be available in a forth coming service pack. In the meantime it is possible to workaround Duet’s auto archiving kicking in by either extending the time of the auto archiving interval or by disabling auto archiving from the Duet client. To extend the the auto archiving interval us the group policy settings “Archive Age” and “Archive frequency” fields are provided . If these fields are not set, the default value of 1 day is chosen for both fields. This means that the Duet user will be prompted everyday with a 30 minute offset daily to archive Duet items. Therefore, if administrators want to display this Dialog at a lower frequency set the “Archive Frequency” field to 365 (the max value). To disable auto archiving from the client open Outlook. From “File” menu select “Duet Archive…” on the dialog that appears uncheck the “Enable Duet AutoArchive” checkbox. Then click “No” so that you don’t start up duet archiving.

There are also a few registry entries in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Duet  which are “ArchiveLastRun” and “ArchiveEnabled”. ArchiveEnable is used for Auto Archiving. If auto archiving is disabled by the Duet user then this value will be 0 and Duet never runs its auto archiving feature until user enables it. ArchiveLastRun is the date of last auto archiving run.  Suppose the administrator hasn’t set any value in the group policy setting for “Archive age” and “Archive Frequency” then Duet will take “Archive age” as 1 day and “Archive frequency” as 1 day. If the Duet client is a new installation then the archiving process is scheduled based upon the Archiving interval (if group policy is not set then it will be 1 day by default). For existing Duet clients it will get the difference between the ArchiveLastRun and current date and if difference is greater than ArchiveInterval then Duet will start auto archive process after 30 min if auto archiving is enabled.

What about the “Archive” button on existing Duet items?

This button simply archive the corresponding item. So even if Duet’s auto archiving is disabled you can still archive Duet items to a PST in a one-off fashion this way. If Duet’s auto archiving is disabled doing this does not re-enable the auto archiving feature.