Best way to inventory for ALL PST files?

mvoeg731 · 03-17-2009, 01:23 PM

I want to invenroty all PST's in my environment. What is the best way to do this?

I have seen auditpls.ini, custom inventory and a sript package posted on the Altiris sites download page.

What makes the most sense and is the safest for my network?

Also, does anyone have the info on how to do it? I could use all the help I could get as I have never done any of these options before?

Thanks in advance for your help.

dfrancis · 03-17-2009, 02:05 PM

Try this:

How do I get this working?

If you're already using Software Inventory, adding PST's to the existing EXE scan is pretty easy and straight-forward with AeXAPEdit.exe.

mvoeg731 · 03-17-2009, 02:11 PM

The link in the document you referenced to Outlook PST File Inventory does not work.

Also, it was suggested to me that I do not do it by adding the .pst to auditpls.ini as it is slow. What is your experience with that? How big is your environement?

dfrancis · 03-17-2009, 03:40 PM

Until you add the pst extension to your auditpls.ini, that query won't return any results.

The environment at the time was about 400 workstations/laptops. We were already scanning for .exe's and I didn't notice any significant increase to scan times when I added .pst's to the scan.

If you're already utilizing Inventory Solution to scan the drive for .exe's, that's probably going to be the most feasible way, since you're still going to be consuming the I/O resources during the scan and you're only increasing the data sent to the NS after the scan by a little bit, assuming someone doesn't have 20,000 different PST's on their computer.

mvoeg731 · 03-17-2009, 03:54 PM

I had heard that it was much slower in terms of doing the inventory from my ITS consultant and wanted to just verify someone's experience with this in a live environment.

I don't have the .pst files in the auditpls.ini, but will add it if I decide this is the best way to do it.

From your previous post, the best way to get the info out is to create a report with that script you have posted?

We have 1100 computers so I will have to test thoroughly before sending out.

dfrancis · 03-17-2009, 04:16 PM

Correct. The business wanted to put a name to the files, so that SQL pulled the machine's primary user from the prior month. You should see computer name, user name, file name, file path, and size of PST in that report.

If you are currently pulling exe data, you could probably make a slight modification to that SQL and change 'pst' to 'exe' to create some mock results so you have an idea of what you would see once you start scanning for PST's.

MadDR · 04-20-2009, 11:44 AM

I know we can inventory files based on extension, but just last week, I found a user who was using PSTs in their Outlook profile which were stored on network drives. I know this is stupid, but, sometimes you can't prevent the users from doing these types of things. My question is: Can we use Altiris to get an inventory of where a user is pulling these PST files from? In other words, can we get the full path of the "Data Files" used within outlook?

Thanks
-DCR

MadDR · 05-12-2009, 02:37 PM

Just wanted to follow up and share my solution.

I found some WMI code (here) which helped me to decode the contents of the Outlook profile. From this, I created the attached VB script (GetPSTInfo.VBS) which saves the Outlook DataFile paths to the HKCU registry. I then use the custom inventory to transfer this info to the Altiris repository. From this, I have written a report which tells me which machines have network based PST files. In case I have not mention this, if you install Office 2007 and Windows Desktop Search (WDS), as soon as you load Outlook with these Network PST files, the performance of the machine goes in the tank. This information is helping us to proactively address this performance issue prior to our corporate installation of Office 2007.

Enjoy...

custinv-PSTInfo.xml

GetPSTInfo.vbs.txt