How to Access Exchange 2000 over a WAN link

[TGMCG]

A bit of background first
My company currently has 300 users located in the HO and 3 remote sites consisting of between 30 and 70 users. The remote sites are connected to the head office by 1/2 MB leased lines. The current setup in the HO is a Exchange 2000 cluster and users using Outlook as their client, No Problems there.
The way we currently deploy Email to the remote sites is through Citrix. However this solution is not meeting remote user needs, Outlook delivered through Citrix takes about 30 seconds to open on client pc's (P4's), sometimes it might take up to 3 attempts to achive a connection to Citrix, users can not export their pst which can be over 300MB files to their local pc's because it would hog all the bandwidth and we are running out of space on the SAN.
It takes up to a minute to attach small documents, the A: is not accessable through citrix, alot of head aches.
I joined this company 6 months ago to manage the remote sites and as you can image the users are screaming at me to try resolve the problem. Personally I don't like Citrix and i am tring to come up with an alternative solution.
I would like to implement exchange servers on the remote sites but am meeting with some resistance from management because of the amount of money spent on 8 Citrix servers.
I have tried connecting a test client directly to the exchange cluster, however sometimes they connect other times they don't.
Is there a product I can deploy on site like an Exchange Proxy, similar to a dhcp proxy/relay?
I am wondering has anyone else had this situation or if anyone knows what the best solution would be.
Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

[BradH]

We have a small remote office using Outlook to connect to Exchange over 768K and VPN tunnel. x.400 and SMTP. Similar delays. The Exchange server is often slow to respond to Outlook's requests. Very little if any network traffic. The remote office is a couple of time zones earlier so Exchange isn't busy when they connect. The backup is long finished.

The current environment is not something IT endorsed. Rather forced from Management. It will never be perfect but what can we do to tweak Exchange and/or Outlook to be more responsive? An offline file seems to help but comes with its own problems.

 

[TGMCG]

Thanks for the reply guys. Have solved the problem by implementing QoS on the WAN links to give priority to the citrix traffic.
OWA is used by home users and another option we are looking at is IMAP.
Not sure about Win 98. I would say you would specify the exchange server under tools then services. If you don't have an option for corporate you might need to go to tools, options, mail services and reconfigure mail support for corporate.

 

[JSwan]

I see a couple of options for you to consider.

1) Make all the remote users POP3 clients and keep their mail in a local .pst file. Set their Outlook clients to hit the server every 1 minute and you'll have very close to real-time email.

2) You might also trying installing Outlook on the Citrix servers and set it up as a published application. Launch the published app via Citrix NFuse and it runs like a local app for the remote user, but its still using the ICA connection. You have all the features of full blown Outlook as opposed to the limited feature set of OWA. Plus all the users are still Exchange clients so you keep all the mailboxes in the data store on the Exchange server.