Email

[[GSV]Trig]

What options are there for mobile email solutions, the boss has a 1.7gb pst file and its slowing his laptop down something cronic, need something a bit more useable but he needs to be able to carry his emails around with him.

[Moby-Dick]

smack him very hard for a start.
There is absolutly no need for a pst that large.

If you seperate the pst down into a number of smaller ones it will help ( and only have him open the PST's he needs )

how did you get on laying slapdown on the FD btw ?

[[GSV]Trig]

1. I would do but hes just "sorted" my wages out so I feel I cant really slap him atm, give it a few days at least...

2. How would you seperate it down, archiving older stuff after about 3 days, he literally gets hundreds of emails a day, some of them contain artwork to be checked before it goes out.

3. FD's still a monkey and apparently wasnt happy about my wages change, he was told it had already been agreed and to just do as he was told. As for systems not working the new stx server went in yesterday and the new version is under testing as we speak, when its done being tested then we'll go live and then start bolting the one-office bits too it and then I can turn the old stx box into the new 2k3 box, need to sort something proper out for emails tho as atm people are using outlook/outlook express and vpop3 on the server which is fine for small stuff but I want something a bit more reliable/flexible.
Things are finally starting to take shape here, shame its the stuff that I wanted done 6 months ago but hey, better late than never, all I gotta do now is sort the bosses laptop, sort out the Cisco site survey for the new wifi link to the new warehouse, sort the phone system link over said wifi network and then put the wifi AP's in the new warehouse for the handhelds and then upgrade the net connection here and sort some kind of VPN to the bosses house and a VPN client for his laptop and recable the existing offices properly and then I can leave and go work somewhere else lol

[TiG]

First thing i'd say to do is i've seen several utils that take a PST file and remove all the attachments out, since words themselves get compacted pretty effectively, its only really the file attachments that really bulk out the pst.

Once you've got the attachment out, get it to compact the PST and i'd say that should bring it down to reasonable size and workable limits.

TiG

[[GSV]Trig]

Sounds like a direction, things is he likes to keep hold of all his old stuff, would it be possible to get outlook to send the removed attatchemtns to a certain place as he likes to file everything and sometimes things can be called back up from several months back so actually removing things isnt an option.

[Moby-Dick]

does this artwork get mailed from an external source ?
if its from internal mails , why can't they just mail a hyperlink to the file ? ( this could be in an area which the boss has a local copy off )

there is also plan "b" - attachment stripping.

I've had limited sucess with this, but its not too bad. ( just has a few gotchas )

http://www.slipstick.com/addins/housekeeping.htm

I used one of the products from sperry software.

[[GSV]Trig]

Some of the stuff is internal some of its not, as long as the boss uses it internally then yes I could setup a bin on the server somewhere that everyone has access to for ditching attachments, iirc vpop3 also allows you to strip attachments and stick them in a global location..

[Moby-Dick]

I dont know how secure the vpop attachment stripping is but its ceratinly a good plan ( might make it tricy if he picks mail up from out of the office ?

[DaBeeeenster]

smack him very hard for a start.
There is absolutly no need for a pst that large.

I'd disagree with that to be honest. People dont like archiving as it then means you have to search through 2 PST files if you are looking for something.

1.7GB is not that large in this day in age...

[Grey M@a]

1.7GB is huge when you work in a university with 30k+ students and staff, quota's are the way to go, look at the number of staff and the pysical storage you can spare through out the company. 1.7GB for a pst file over a network that gets hammered daily, even worse if connecting off to an exchange server to reference that 1.7GB pst every time to see if changes are present :/

[Moby-Dick]

Its more about how you use mail though.

Its a messaging system, not a file storage system. A poorly managed mailbox will grow rapidly as it fills with useless information.

Say you have 1000 mail enabled users , that makes the investment in your mail system considerably more expensive.

Try explaining to someone that they can have a big mailbox , or their annual bonus ( which would have otherwise be spent on building exchange boxes with several TB storage capacity ) and they'll start to like archiving and removing unnessesary attachments.

[Moby-Dick]

1.7GB is huge when you work in a university with 30k+ students and staff, quota's are the way to go, look at the number of staff and the pysical storage you can spare through out the company. 1.7GB for a pst file over a network that gets hammered daily, even worse if connecting off to an exchange server to reference that 1.7GB pst every time to see if changes are present :/

I'd not begun to think that large

just to ut things in perspective , Abbey National has a Fixed mailbox size limit and no PST's allowed.
Mailbox management is a major facotr there , but when you have 100k users , its essential.

[Grey M@a]

luckily we have the majority of the staff clued up here, a while back i remember someone with emails going years back that they forgot about, to be honest the staff are worse than the students for mass attchments.

On the pst front, its used more of a mid way method for when the user logs on and off outlook, checks to see if anything new is there and saves what ever has arrived over the day when they log off, due to the quota's once they hit the limit they get a warning about it but it will not stop them sending as to not interupt the work flow but will stop incomming in a futher 5mb's time, so they generally clear it out.

[Moby-Dick]

This is one of the nice things about sharepoint win a fully office 2003 environment - when you attach a file to a mail it can chuck it into sharepoint instead, so that you can share it that way and not waste space on your exchange server

[Grey M@a]

Share point does help on that front, atleast it has its uses.

[[GSV]Trig]

No sharepoint here, just good old outlook 2000 and vpop3, as were upgrading the server to a 2k3 box and office 2003 will be in when I catch up with the liceneses is there a quick fix for now (6 months).

I've told outlook to acrchive everything after 14 days to archive.pst and the folder he keeps things stored in into zfiles.pst after a month, is there a way to force outlook to archive now so I can check if this is gonna work?

Really need to gen up on Exchange and stuff and see if theres a better way to have it setup this end..