No OST for Outlook 2010 on a Terminal Server

We had installed Microsoft Office 2010 on our Windows 2008 R2 Terminal Servers, and we didn’t customize the Office 2010 installation. I was looking for a way to prevent Outlook from generating a new OST file whenever a new user logged on to our Terminal Servers, in addition, I wanted the Outlook profile to be generated automatically.

Enter Group Policy Objects!

Since these policies are applied only for the TS servers, I moved the the computer accounts to a new Organization Unit (OU) that I created for these servers. I linked the new GPO to this OU. There are many documents that show how to do these steps, so I won’t be going over this.

The key point to remember for this GPO to work is: loopback processing mode

The above is true especially if your TS servers inherit policies from top level GPOs.

In my case, I was concerned about making changes to the user configuration section, to be more specific, to the Outlook 2010 settings.

The screenshot basically shows what needs to be done in order to achieve this goal.