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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."
If you arn't connecting with your main computer, the web based interface is one of the better ones. I have no problems accessing over my fairly slow DSL connection, and the one time I saw it used with dialup it didn't work any worse than any other email client over dialup. Wow, its been almost 6 years since I have used dialup for more than a week.
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... try Outlook Web Access, or maybe just have them use Outlook in a Terminal Services session. Either way is a hell of a lot faster than accessing the mailbox directly over dialup.
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.
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Over a remote modem connection, I've found using Terminal Services to run Outlook to be faster than trying any of the other arrangements.
Doesn't help them get mail when offline, though.
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If the Exchange server and Outlook are both setup correctly you should not see this kind of delay and speed issue. The Outlook client should besetup of syncronize the offline folder with the server when they are online. In this way the only headers that need to be sent to the client on each connect are any new ones the client already has all the old ones. Also reasonable limits on the size of the exchange mailbox help alot. We have found here that approx 65MB mailboxes are ideal...the upper limit is around 150MB before things really get ugly. Don't let users use mail as a failing cabinet, or at least force them to personal folders (which we don't recommend to the users here, loose the hardrive loose the mail) as that function. Tell them to keep only useful mail, and be responsible about deleting and keeping the mailbox clean, move attachments to safe storage locations.
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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.
After re-reading your post, I got to thinking that you don't specify what client the workstations are running. It Occurred to me that you may be running Windows 2000/NT on these laptops and that you may have implemented Roaming Profiles (for Windows).
This type of configuration can be an issue as users frequently store full files on their desktop which is part of the profile, rather than just short cuts to the files. This causes the profiles to grow very large, I've seen 60 Meg profiles, before people started complaining about performance when logging in.
If this is the problem that you are having, you should configure your environment to use the locally cached profile when slow links are detected. This will prevent trying to pull a 60 Meg desktop profile across a 56K link. This configuration is done at a domain level using Group Policy Objects.
But, like I said before, you don't really give enough information in your post.
Your exchange box is behind a firewall, right?
Having them VPN in solves a lot of DNS, routing and other such issues, as well as security, and blah blah blah. That's how I did it, at least, last time I had to worry about offline users talking to Exchange. Worked pretty good, too.
Oh, and Outlook Web Access. True, doesn't help with the offline stuff, but how many users REALLY need that? Otherwise, tell them to sync at night in the hotel room when it doesn't matter, or to find a broadband connection.
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I'm running Outlook 2000 w/ Exchange 2000 on the backend. Connecting from home over a VPN takes 3-4 minutes to initialize the connection and start seeing new mail. Connecting with Mozilla via IMAP takes less than three seconds to read new mail. I'm not even exaggerating or joking.
is the reason why users have two different profiles because you have an established WORKGROUP that the user must be on to connect to the Exchange server via the Exchange method?
If so, why not create two different profiles, but then alias the mail to one shared PST file r/w by both profiles?
In addition to setting up offline folders, you need to force Outlook to 'Work Offline' or present the user with a choice between 'Connect' and 'Work Offline' when Outlook starts.
If Outlook sees any kind of network connection, it will default to 'Connect' if not told otherwise, no matter if the link is 56k or 100Mbps...
So, combine that with properly sync'd offline folders (sync when logging off when connected), you'll have none of this trouble.
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Metaframe allows you to access bandwidth-intensive applications like Outlook over low bandwidth links such as 56k modems. The application runs on the server, and Citrix only sends compressed screen deltas and keystokes across the WAN.
Client software runs on any operating system, including OS X and Linux. I use this configuration daily to access Outlook and MS Office from my home Linux and Solaris machines, and it works great.
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