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Traveling Laptops, Exchange 2000, and Multiple Profiles?
PDiddy asks: "Working for a corporation which uses Exchange 2000, I have run into countless traveling users with laptops that have complaints about how their mail is received from the outside vs. inside. Most of these users have a 56k or less dialup when on the road, so having them connect with an Exchange profile is incredibly slow, even with 'Offline Folders' enabled. The second option is to have two profiles. One for Exchange (Inside), and have it default to delivering to a PST. The second profile (Outside) be setup for POP and set it to the same PST. On the surface, this solution looks great to the user, but the ability to nightly backup the mail on the exchange server is removed. The third option would be to have a combination of the two approaches, the difference being the exchange profile (Inside), would leave the mail on the server, but then you have users complaining about having to sort through their new mail twice.
What I need is a good, all around solution. Perhaps their are some third-party plugins for outlook I am unaware of to create a new solution?
Also, are their any recommended methods for accessing an Exchange global address book over a very slow connection, or, perhaps syncing updates to laptop while connected so it can be used on the road? Currently, if you export that address book, it will set the email addresses to X.400, which will not work from a POP profile."
Remote access can be a pain, especially if you don't have a huge amount of $$$ to throw at the problem.
Now you know.
Not everyone can always have a broadband connection.
Web interface email is your best bet.
Just use IMAP and be done with it. Yes, you must have the space on the server for everyone to store their mail, but you can limit the size of the mailbox on the Exchange server. That will eliminate the calls to the help desk when a user blows away his 2 GIGABYTE .pst file and needs it restored. (True story.) If you're still afraid of the storage requirements, then just consider that it's all disk space in your company, somewhere. Whether it's on the email server, or spread over the file and print servers, it's still the same company spending the same money on the same amount of disk storage.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
The description of your environment and your problem are not exactly clear, as you list several different configurations. However, I think that there is definitely a problem.
The fact is that Microsoft has already addressed this very issue in the best possible way. Configuring the laptops with mobile Outlook profiles causes the Outlook to leave all mail in the users mailbox on the Exchange server but, at the same time it caches the the mail in a local file along with the global address book. this allows the user full mail functionality while disconnected from the Exchange server but then synchronizes any changes when the laptop is later connected. While the synchronization process is not entirely transparent, especially on slow connections, it is not unreasonably intrusive, either. The only time that I have found it to be an issue is when people have large attachments in the mail messages.
Contrary to the other recommendations, POP3 and IMAP alternatives will NOT be any faster than the native MAPI connection. Indeed, these alternative protocols will instead reduce functionality, as you have partially stated in your post.
From the description of your problem it is difficult to identify the specific problem. But, it sounds as though there is an issue which is causing excessive delays in connecting to Exchange via MAPI. This type of problem is less frequent with Exchange 2000 than it was with 5.5 but, it can still occur. Perhaps the most common problem for delays in connecting to Exchange remotely is a name resolution problem. You can test if this is the issue by starting a remote connection from one of these laptops (don't start Outlook) and see if you can ping the Exchange server by name. If ping does not resolve the name and start pinging immediately then there is a name resolution problem. If that is not the issue there is also a potential problem with name resolution in Outlook itself. I recommend having a look at this Knowledgebase article.
More information about your problem would certainly be helpful in finding the answer but, the only way to use Exchange faster than the above configuration is to use Outlook Web Access through a browser.