After releasing the hotfix for enabling Exchange 2010 personal archives for Outlook 2007 users yesterday, the related knowledgebase article was published today (KB2458611).

What you might notice when reading the list of fixed issued is that the article doesn’t mention the included support for archives. Interesting. One might wonder what that implies from a support perspective.

Update: There are reports of issues with Outlook 2007 after installing update KB2412171, like Loss of Archive/Auto-Archive functions (not to be confused with personal archives), performance issues and Outlook Anywhere/NTLM issues.  Since KB2458611 is based on that update, so you might expect similar issues. More information here by Outlook MVP Ben Schorr.

Update: Official information confirms three issues have been identified with this fix:

1. Secure Password Authentication issues when configured but server doesn’t support it (e.g. GMail);
2. If you haven’t configured an Exchange account,
   1. Performance issues;
   2. Inability to configure AutoArchive for IMAP/POP3 or Outlook Live accounts.

More information on the Outlook Product Team blog here.

Update: The Microsoft Exchange team blogged about the December 2010 update for Office 2007 here. They state that “This update extends archive support to Outlook 2007”. In the same blog, the archiving functionality I described earlier here is hereby also officially confirmed.

Update: The Outlook team re-released the hotfix which addresses the 3 issues mentioned above (and on which the Outlook team blogged here). You can download the updated KB2412171 hotfix here.