Outlook 2003 - suggestions

I am dealing with a user who has this setup on his laptop for collecting email:

• He has a large PST file for delivering all mail from the server directly to his laptop
• He has a calender that is held on the Exchange server and can be viewed by several other people
• He also has a personal calender which is related directely to his email inbox (they are part of the same PST file)

When he is sent meeting requests via email, if the meeting is accepted it is stored directly on his PST file...as this is the default location for all this sort of information to be sent. Is there a way to have appointment entries in fact go to his Exchange server calender rather than his PST file calender...but still have his email delivered directly to his Personal Folder.

The 2 calenders are causing much conflict and confusion.

Any suggestions much appreciated, I am racking my brains a bit here!!

Tom

if he has outlook 2003 , then mail shoudl be kept on the server not on the PST.
when he's not on the network he should be using the cached mode to keep an offline copy of his mails , not a PST file ( be carefull on the size of that PST , if it goes over 2gb you'll have......fun )

Yeh I realise the issue with needing the emails on the server...however I only do as I am told by those above ;) so it has been decided he should have a PST file on his laptop to store all his emails.

We don't have cached mode enabled anyway as this has caused issues in the past and the PST file gives him the ability to roam around different sites and still pick his email up.

Anymore ideas?

The issue is that you are trying to use exchange in a way its not designed to work.

connecting to the network from different sites should make no difference if you are using cached mode correctly. I can connect to our exchange server without using a PST from any one of our 500 sites without an issue.

Failing that create a second account for the guy's meeting requests and have him use outlook web access to connect to the calender.

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Originally Posted by Moby-Dick

if he has outlook 2003 , then mail shoudl be kept on the server not on the PST.
when he's not on the network he should be using the cached mode to keep an offline copy of his mails , not a PST file

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QFT.

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be carefull on the size of that PST , if it goes over 2gb you'll have......fun

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If it's an Outlook 2003 PST (i.e. one not imported from an old Outlook version) it's got a 20GB limit, something to do with changing to unicode I believe.

20Gb ? thats pretty sizable , but horrible. I'm afriad I'm going to have to kill you and anyone thats read your post before users get the impression that they can use outlook as a file storage device ;)

Yeh the size on newer PST files have increased dramatically.

Re. the cache memory, I see the point and to me it makes sense...however my hands are tied and I am not allowed to do it. My latest thought that I have put through the boss (she is going to test it over the next day or so) is to sync the laptop to work with Exchange in an offline mode, so therefore store all emails etc in an OST file instead. This will allow him to still view contractual emails when away from the office, and it will also leave us with the backup of them here as well as having his calender held here.

How does that sound? Cheers for help so far by the way guys.

Exchanged cached mode does exactly the same thing as having an OST!

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Originally Posted by TomWilko

How does that sound?

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You just described cached exchange mode. That's what it does, .ost and .oab files periodically synced with the server.

Moby: Don't even go there, I spend half my life dealing with .pst files. We have hundreds of gigabytes of them scattered round the file servers, if we could get users to archive them we could shut down half the company servers and never worry about disk space ever again. Most of the crap stored in them is just that, crap. We're not even allowed to enable disk quotas and the mailbox quotas are reminder only, no enforcement. Must stop...getting depressed...

see if you can sell them on the idea of GFI mail archiver - it streams all the mail into an SQL database , which users can then access as a central archive.

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Originally Posted by Moby-Dick

see if you can sell them on the idea of GFI mail archiver - it streams all the mail into an SQL database , which users can then access as a central archive.

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Systems tried to sell it and failed, even with an ROI of about 2 months :(

get a better salesman :)

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Originally Posted by Moby-Dick

get a better salesman :)

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Or start working for a company that views IT as a core support service rather than a necessary evil.

Didn't realise OST sync and Cache Memory were the same thing...learn something new everyday and all that :) It will be the reason why I am simply a 1 year placement student and you guys get paid a lot and given more responsibility to do these sort of things lol!

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Originally Posted by TomWilko

It will be the reason why I am simply a 1 year placement student and you guys get paid a lot and given more responsibility to do these sort of things lol!

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Yeah...paid a lot...um...right.

Hint: Finish your degree no matter what. Trust me. Really, I'm serious.