You may have spent a lot of time searching group policy for this option in Windows 2000 or 2003. You may have even gone as far as downloading the Microsoft Outlook ADM file for office 2000 XP or 2003 to try and find this option to add to group policy. If you haven’t tried these things then let me save you some time. It ain’t there! You need another way to sort this which is what I describe here.

I can’t understand why this is not an available option, it must be a common enough problem. Very few companies backup the C drive on PCs or would want peoples archives saved in their profiles and slowing logins down. There are options to change the location for pst files but even though archive files are pst files it doesn’t change the default location for them.
The only way I have found to change this en mass is by creating an Outlook prf file. It basically works as an exe file but is easily edited using a text editor such as notepad. The prf files in their basic format can cause a few problems such as many backup profiles appearing in the control panel mail properties. At the bottom of this article I have put a link to a prf file I have created. Download and edit using notepad or a text editor. The bit you will need to change is section 4 AutoArchiveFileName = “h:\archive.pst”. It’s currently going to H as that’s where my home drives are stored. As always make sure you have everything backed up and you test throughly before deployment.

How you deploy this is the next hurdle to overcome. You can place on a network drive, use a login script or use some other kind of deployment tool. 

This is not an ideal solution and I’m sure there must be a better way to change the archive location. If anyone has a better solution it would be great to here from you.

Here is the link to the samle prf file:
http://www.johnkellett.co.uk/downloads/archive.prf