Over the years, many companies have grown accustomed to using PST files to offer users an archive-like experience. Especially, the ease of use and neat integration within Outlook made it a very popular feature. On the other hand, PST files also have some severe drawbacks. First of all, as they should only be stored locally on the computer, it's very difficult to make them highly available. To work around this problem, many companies have wrongly stored PST files on a network share. However, this is not supported and can easily render a PST file corrupt. Not to mention the slowness it brings upon Outlook and the fact they're not available through OWA. All in all, enough reasons to try to avoid them.

Because PST files should be stored locally on the computer, you as an administrator have little or no control over them, meaning that you cannot easily control access to them nor can you apply policies on them. As a result, PST files can be a liability to the security...