Update: After fixing some issues (see here) the Outlook team re-released hotfix KB2412171 and made it available for direct download here or you can get it through Windows Update.

It seems the Office 2007 Cumulative Update for December 2010 (KB2479671) will contain support for the long awaited support for Exchange 2010 Personal Archives in Outlook 2007. Note that support is limited as not all functionality found in Outlook 2010 is present, but it is usable from a customer perspective.

After applying the Outlook 2007 hotfix (SP2 is a prerequisite), archive-enabled users can do the following:

• Access and move messages to or from their personal archive;
• Mailboxes for which you have full access permissions will be automatically added to your Outlook view (known as auto mapping of shared mailboxes) inspecting the msExchDelegateListLink attribute (more info on this at Steve Goodman’s blog here);
• If you have full access permissions to an archive-enabled mailbox, that archive will be accessible and automatically displayed as well.

In the screenshot below you’ll the the user’s mailbox (Francis Blake), his Personal Archive and he has full access permissions to Philip Mortimer’s mailbox, who is also archive-enabled:

Unfortunately, there are also a few things not implemented, e.g.

• No support for archiving policies, meaning users won’t be able to override centrally configured retention and archiving policy settings using personal tags in Outlook. More info on archiving policies and personal tags here;
• Not integral searches, meaning you need to search the mailbox or the personal archive seperately. Searching “all mail items” will not retrieve results from the personal archive, as shown in the screenshot below:

It is unknown if these omissions are going to be introduced in a later hotfix, as the initial hotfix for personal archives in Outlook 2007 was set for Q1/Q2 2011.

Be advised that this hotfix will enable personal archive functionality for the following product versions only:

• Office Ultimate (Retail)
• Office ProPlus (Volume License)
• Office Enterprise (Volume License)
• Outlook Standalone (Retail or Volume License)

Note that the Outlook 2007 update for archive support is still not mentioned on the cumulative update page as the cumulative update package has yet to be released. However, the KB article has been published (KB2458611). You can request and retrieve the individual hotfix here.

Thanks for Ankur Kothari (@ankbomb) from product management for the early update.