Cached mode in Outlook 2003

[Griffyn]

Hi all,

Some might think this belongs to the office thread, but I'm pretty sure from my reading that Exchange 5.5 is part of the problem/solution.

Using Enterprise version and some folks have mailboxes in excess of 2GB (don't ask, and yes, it's backed up every night). There's no problem with those mailboxes except when the laptop users want to use Cached mode in Outlook 2003 so that they have all their mail when they're at home or on the road. This puts a 2GB limit on things. Without going into all the details, it gets horrible and messy when their mailbox exceeds this 2GB limit.

Is there a way I can bypass this limit? Microsoft has some documentation saying something about Unicode and how that allows cached mode to exceed 2GB. The laptop users already have NTFS partitions, so this seems to be the only hurdle.

Anyone have any info for me?

 

[zbnet]

I would say pretty much all your questions would be answered by this article:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2003/three/ch7/outb04.htm

Your users could have problems with mailboxes that aren't yet 2GB, as an OST (or PST for that matter) is less efficient than the Exchange sore, so a 1.5GB mailbox could easily be more than 2GB of data in an OST.

The article suggests that if you have large mailboxes, you need to ensure the OST is indeed an unicode file. It also states that OSTs larger than 1GB are less efficient and much slower (ie not recommended), so prepare your users for trouble if they continue down this road.

Do they *really* need more than 2GB of email accessible in their mailboxes? This is a serious amount of email to justify as current to their job function.

 

[Griffyn]

They do a lot of quote requests and receive spreadsheet and large product image attachments. Outlook has become their filing system to refer to previous quotes etc. Any new system I put in place will force them to do more work, and so I'm hesitant to bother. I know users.

I'm working on discouraging those laptop users from using Cached mode. I mean come on, leave work at work!

I'll have a solid read of that article and see where it gets me.

Thanks zbnet.

 

[Valier]

I kind of have this problem too. My clients are Outlook 2000, 2002 and 2003. (And Exchange 5.5 of course)
I have stopped all (?) caching and offline things on clients.
But still, once in a while it all freezez.
On some clients, it says "Requesting data from Exchange server..." and you see an "indicator" slowly filling with blue from left to right.
I think it started with OL 2002 and 2003 clients.
But it wouldn´t be that nice to roll back to OL 2000 clients.
If we don´t use Offline mode, can I rename or delete all OST-files, or do they have another mission too.
Or can I find the solution in archiving and deleteing in mailboxes at every client?

What is this, and what to do?

Mike

 

[Griffyn]

the OST files are the offline storage. The can be deleted if you're not using cached mode.