I'm running an Exchange 2000 server, with only a few users (around 10). Some of them manage all of their whole work in email. They often send/get documents several megabytes large, and send/receive revisions of that file several times a day. Consequently, they have mailboxes of 5 gb or more. I can only support a few of those users on an Exchange 2000 server, with its 16 gb store limit. Every now and then I make them archive old mail into a pst; however very large psts (> 2 gb) are slow and unreliable and splitting their mail over several pst's + their exchange mailbox isn't convenient for them (difficult to search for all mail from one person when those mails are spread over, what are in outlook, different email accounts; plus, they don't have access to the pst from other computers or through webmail).
I have, of course, also tried to educate users that they shouldn't send 'too large' documents. Most of them have no concept of size of electronic documents, let alone that would have a change to make an informed decision on whether or not a file is suitable for transport via email. Getting them to use other ways to transfer files is out of the question.
So, as fas as I see, the options are:
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Tell users to suck it up and manually manage their pst collection (not really an option, they'll screw up and blame me)
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Find some way for users to manage large amounts of email offline. Not sure there is a way to do this in Outlook.
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Find another (non-Outlook) way to manage loads of offline email, synchronized with Outlook. Not very feasible IMO, but I'm happy to be shown wrong.
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Would upgrading Exchange help? Can I run Exchange 2007 with mailboxes of 10's of GB? Can Outlook handle that?
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Other?
Any ideas? Thanks.
Best Answer
Exchange 2007 will make this particular problem disappear... no, really. (Check here for a detailed explanation of why). First, it removes the 16GB limit. Second, its I/O footprint is hugely improved over Exchange 2003, which in turn is an improvement over 2000. Third, it features a ton of other performance and security improvements.
Outlook 2007 SP2 also includes a bunch of fixes to provide better performance for large mailboxes, too. With the combination of the two products you should be good to go.
Depending on PSTs is asking for trouble, as they aren't centrally managed or backed up.
More broadly, you might want to investigate SharePoint as a document store so that your users gain revision control and check-in/check-out functionality, not to mention moving all those documents out of your Exchange databases.