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Microsoft

Traveling Laptops, Exchange 2000, and Multiple Profiles? 55

Posted by Cliff from the dealing-with-two-email-delivery-routes dept.
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."
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Traveling Laptops, Exchange 2000, and Multiple Profiles? More

Traveling Laptops, Exchange 2000, and Multiple Profiles?

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  • Use Exchange's web interface (Score:3, Informative)

    by nelsonal ( 549144 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:45AM (#4810413) Journal
    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.

  • Since you're in bed with MS already... (Score:5, Informative)

    by seanmeister ( 156224 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:46AM (#4810415)
    ... try Outlook Web Access [microsoft.com], 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • There's also a Plus Pack available [messageware.net] for Outlook Web Access that adds a bunch of features that make it work just as well as the desktop version (e.g. Rolodex/Address Book, Spell Checking, new email notification, Secure Logoff). This software is provided by a company called Messageware.

      <Disclaimer>I built the website for messageware.net but don't make any money off the software :) </Disclaimer>

  • Remote access can be a pain (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <vasqzr@noSpaM.netscape.net> on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:52AM (#4810458)

    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.

    • This didn't get modded up and it should have.

      *** Web email ***

      Educate your users a bit and show them how nice it is and how fast it is and your problem is solved.

      We use Imail here (about 150 users) and it works great. The web mail works from anywhere, is fairly quick and easy to use. I get like 0 calls about web access.

      Duke

  • Screw the proprietary interface (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dunkirk ( 238653 ) <david@@@davidkrider...com> on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @12:04PM (#4810552) Homepage
    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.
    • That's great and all until Joe Traveler asks why he can't get his calendar that way. And they're going to demand that they have access to those 2GB worth of "important archives" - you know, the same lame jokes and pictures that are clogging the system to begin with. I've always wondered what is up with people insisting on saving every email, along with it's attachment. People don't feel compelled to record their voice mails to cassette tape, why is email different?

      Outlook Web Access would handle the calendaring function. That, plus your IMAP suggestion would give them the most flexibility, but that would add a training overhead. They could use IMAP when they're on the road, and, when they need to use the calendar they can fire up OWA. Of course, you can get masochistic and copy their PST over for them to their laptop before every trip, but that introduces all sorts of problems.

      For the address book, I know Mozilla Mail has an option to download LDAP directories for offline use, I'm sure Outlook has similar functionality.
      • Because recording voicemail to caset is hard. Archiveing voicemail is easy. Believe me, I would record the voicemail if I could, but it is just not practical.
      • I do save my voicemail, as I get mine e-mailed from the phone company :-P

        As to why I save it all, it's because I have to. I have to deal with many different people in many organisations that don't always see eye to eye or have the same goals and perspectives. What's more I usually have to keep em all happy. This requires a good archive and saving my e-mail is part of that. It's good to have some e-mail to wave around if fingerpointing starts. Believe me, stuff like this happens all the time, especially in larger organisations. It's also a good way to be able to transfer work to a replacement (As a consultant I get switched around projects a lot) It saves a lot of annoying phone calls if your replacement can just search your mail archive to see when you told what to who.

        I did a lot of serverside work on Exchange so I know a large edb is a pain. Teach your users that say they need it how to make .pst's on cd or whatever and keep maximem mailboxsizes (up to 50MB tops) small. Works in most places.

  • Sounds like your environment has issues (Score:3, Informative)

    by haplo21112 ( 184264 ) <haplo@epithnaFREEBSD.com minus bsd> on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @12:23PM (#4810712) Homepage
    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.
    • Which of course users won't do. If they were reasonable un-pushy users they wouldn't be stuck using exchange in the first place.

      Furthermore there will be alot of issues anyways over a 56k line because of the contact list merging, which always seems to be very large, and thus always seems to be very slow. The calendars try to update the same way, and they too are usually fairly full for road users (salesguys).

      Unfortunately there's no really good alternative (currently; there's a few open and non-open options, but they are imo, not better) to Exchange if you *NEED* shared calendaring integrated with email. Wether you actually *NEED* that is another question, and usually a moot one.

  • how many (Score:2, Funny)

    by jjshoe ( 410772 )
    how many exchange servers does it take to send an email?


    60. 59 to verify you have the proper liscence and one to actualy do the work :)


    actualy i must say as much of a linux fan that i am its nice to see something get posted for microsoft. i dont think /. should be entirely based around linux. as much as i dont like it microsoft will be around for a while

    • Eh? Exchange servers don't verify licenses...that's a job left up to the Windows Licensing Service. Disable it and you're done. Unless you have SBS...but, by design, that's only 1 server.

      Now, if your joke would have been "How many servers does it take to send an Exchange email?", and the punchline "60. 59 to clean the viruses, and 1 sendmail server to send the damn thing." That would have been funny.

  • From an article [pcmag.com] at PCMag:

    "a massive overhaul in Outlook that makes messages easier to read and manage and lets users switch between online and offline modes without restarting."

    from a MS PressPass article [microsoft.com] site:

    "Also, because information workers aren't always working online or from the office, Outlook includes an improved mobile e-mail experience that is more consistent across the range of today's networks and data connections. By introducing a new cached e-mail system and intelligent connection settings, Outlook allows mobile workers to get to their e-mail more quickly and transfer between data connections with little or no interruption."

  • More clarity would help. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @12:28PM (#4810760)
    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 [microsoft.com] 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.
    • 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.
      • My trip last week required dial-up from a hotel room. Max connection speed was 19200, man I hate that!

        In any case, Outlook 2000 took only 2-3 seconds to start and new mail (the first few of 50+) was present within 5 seconds of Outlook startup. By the way, I hate to admit it but the mailbox contains 3000+ messages.

        It sounds to me that you have Mozilla properly configured but, you do have an issue with your Outlook configuration.

        Excuse me, I have to go clean out my mailbox. ;)
        • I don't think Outlook is configured wrong, and I've only got 1400 messages (nice round number). The overhead of the protocol is stunning. When you're scrolling the goddamned list of messages traffic passes on the wire since there's no cached copies of the headers stored. Every time you click a message, Exchange sends the full thing - again with no caching. My home connection is cable (and very fast), and even on that I've completely given up using Outlook. Shared calendars just isn't worth the minutes of wait time.
          • But, it is configured "wrong", you said so yourself. since there's no cached copies of the headers stored If it was configured correctly the entire message would be cached locally.

            When you first install Outlook it asks "Do you travel with this computer". If you choose YES it will configure Outlook to work in offline mode and cache the mailbox locally. If you choose NO then you get your present configuration which is unbarable over a slow link.

            Also, note that if you have Terminal Services installed on your system, Outlook will not allow installation in Off-ine mode. See Q246052 about this issue.
            • I've tried the offline mode, and it only accelerates reading mail when I'm switched to Offline. As soon as Outlook realizes it's online, that same delay occurs. And what's worse is that it synchronizes the entire Inbox (plus other selected folders) on exit by comparing the messages on my hard drive to the ones in exchange - one by one. Call me crazy or naive, but there isn't much chance that a received message is going to change. With over a thousand messages, the delay in sync-on-exit is waaaaaay too long.

              Trust me, I've personally installed and configured Exchange and Outlook many times of the last couple of years. Any time I've been given a choice, I've chosen IMAP on a Linux/Solaris/BSD machine. The Exchange protocol is very, very bloated. There is no reason to not use the cached offline copies of data just because it detects a connection, that's fucking nuts. If my copy of Mozilla had to redownload a message every time I changed my selection in the folder I'd also be extremely pissed at that. Although with Moz I can file a bug report - with Outlook, I can upgrade to Outlook XP and still have all the same bugs - but with new, non-standard toolbars and menubars.

      • Re:What??? (Score:3, Informative)

        by joshuac ( 53492 )
        ---snip
        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.
        ---snip

        Much more is done when you initially connect with the exchange protocol (do not call it MAPI, I've already seen a couple of people here handing out exchange advice who don't know the difference between a protocol and an API) than happens with IMAP. Public free/busy, flagged messages, alert queue, more being checked before the message list is even looked at. If all _you_ want is the messages, then IMAP is great.

        All the answers I've read so far seem to be shots in the dark. My shot in the dark; use the "remote mail" functionality in the client (assuming you are using outlook 98 or higher, if your running outlook 97 it is time to take advantage of the "free" upgrade to outlook 2000 included with exchange server).

        Finding out there are (still employed) admins out there forcing their users to connect to their exchange mailbox at 56Kbps using a protocol designed to run over 10Mbps connections, that is hilarious. Use the remote mail tools, that is what they are there for. RTFM if you have never used them before.

        You will find the remote mail tools work at about the same speed as an IMAP connection (only extended support for message header info unique to exchange which can be more helpful than what IMAP can provide when deciding whether or not you want to download that 24MB message). Also, from the client side, you will still see calendar, task folders, etc. in the same mailbox store, which is nice.
        • Remote mail is way too flaky, constantly bringing up a VPN connection and dropping it, adding the overhead of that protocol. I'll stick with IMAP and Mozilla - hell, even configuring Outlook to just use IMAP is a better solution all around IMO.

          If I actually ever give a damn about the calendar, tasks or notes I'll just use the web-based Outlook client - which amazingly enough doesn't require Internet Explorer (it'll even run under NS4 for Linux).

          • ---snip
            Remote mail is way too flaky, constantly bringing up a VPN connection and dropping it, adding the overhead of that protocol. I'll stick with IMAP and Mozilla - hell, even configuring Outlook to just use IMAP is a better solution all around IMO.
            ---snip

            You need the VPN connection anyway if you are going to connect using the native protocol. If it is constantly disconnecting you, then something is wrong with your setup.

            ---snip
            If I actually ever give a damn about the calendar, tasks or notes I'll just use the web-based Outlook client - which amazingly enough doesn't require Internet Explorer (it'll even run under NS4 for Linux).
            ---snip

            As I said, if all you want is mail, IMAP is great.

  • Well, you could switch to Lotus Notes.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Much better support for roaming users. Much much better. You can decide what the maximum size of messages, and of file attachments, that you want to replicate down while you're over a slow link. Encrypted, compressed, streamed transmission. And you can dial in direct to the server itself, or use a pass-thru server (kinda like a reverse proxy) so that users can use any Internet access to securely get back to everything.

    Things don't get any more secure than that.

    The CIA uses Lotus Notes. If it's secure enough for them.....
  • I know that this is offtopic, but I can't help but be grateful that I can use pine over a ssh connection when I see articles like this. I can access all of my mail from nearly anywhere in the world and have the same capabilities as if I were sitting at my desk. I can even access it using only a java-enabled web browser using mindterm [appgate.com].

    • OK.. use rdesktop (www.rdesktop.org) as a port forward
      over an ssh tunnel, and Windows Terminal Services.
      Their Outlook will be the identical local and remote.
      on 56 K lines the screen painting will be a bit slow.
      but it's quite nice on DSL (I can't tell the difference
      between home & work.)

  • VPN (Score:3, Informative)

    by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrunNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @01:02PM (#4810995) Journal

    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.

  • 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?

  • Outlook Needs to be Setup to 'Work Offline' (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mad Browser ( 11442 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @01:27PM (#4811185) Homepage
    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.
    • Mod the parent up, as they say.

      This is the real answer to the poster's dilemma. A properly configured outlook client will only be marignally slowing than POP mail.

      We use Exchange and Outlook where I work too. When I travel I configure to work fully in offline mode and synchronize my inbox/outbox/address book every 10 minutes. Even with 100,000 or so entries in our corporate address book this doesn't present a problem as Outlook is smart enough to only synch changes... assuming, of course, that the user is smart enough to turn on the feature.
  • O W A. As in "Outlook Web Access"

    Can be configured to allow anyone with a valid login/password to attach to your mail server WITHOUT the need for a VPN. Face it, VPNs confuse some people and for the most part end users are stupid.

    OWA doesn't address the off-line issue, but still allows you to back up their mail. When they return to the office, they can sync up and get their mail copied down locally.


  • 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.


    • Absolutely. We use a highly optimized Citrix implementation where I now work and it is wonderful. Even on the LAN accessing email through Citrix is quicker and no matter what computer I am at, there is MY email. Accessing my email off a farm of 4x 1GHz Pentium III Xeon's is a lot faster than locally on my slow desktop. It is an expensive and time consuming product to get in and working correctly, but once it does, things get slow, drop another 1u server in the farm and cruise along. Unfortunately, it is a royal pain to get it to that point. You'll get to know your consultants VERY well.

  • When you buy proprietary, you do so for "support" reasons. Use them.
  • Dear Sir,

    Thank you for using the Microsoft helpdesk at Slashdot. Unfortunately your request should be redirect to the main Microsoft website [microsoft.com]. You purchased the Exchange server and client from them, so they will be providing you the top-notch support you expect from Slashdot. If you feel that they cannot help you, please ask for a refund for your product.
  • There's no news, there's no stuff that matters. It's all been replaced by a pile of stinking microsoft exchange weenies.
  • I'm personally not a big fan of GroupWise, but I think it has some of the functionality you're looking for. Mind you, I'm somewhat new at supporting GroupWise, and I could be a bit off on my details here, but I think I'm pretty close.

    The GroupWise client has 3 modes:
    Online
    Caching
    Remote

    The Online mode acts as a local LAN connection should, a consistant connection to the server.

    I'm a little confused as to the exact operation of the Remote mode, but it does copy everything down. I haven't used this much, but it appears to be more like the local PST file scenario.

    The cool feature is the Caching mode. The first time you switch to Caching mode, you should be on the LAN. This will create a local copy of all your mail. Now when you go, you have everything with you. Changes made will effect both the local system and be propegated back to the server so that when you switch back to Online mode, it's like nothing ever happened.

    How does this help you? You may try experimenting to see if the GroupWise client will function in the same manner in your Exchange environment. Yeah, it's kind of annoying having a second client, but the good news is that there's add-ons to make GroupWise look and feel just like Outlook.

    I guess the ultimate solution would be to have Microsoft do something similar with the Outlook client.

    IMHO, Outlook/Exchange is a better overall system than GroupWise, but GroupWise has this one feature that makes it worthwhile, especially for travelling.
    • This is all on a massive tangent to the question (and no, you can't just get the GW client to talk to Exchange) but anyway:

      Caching mode assumes that you normally have a quick (LAN) connection to the POA. It works pretty well when you have users who are normally in the office, but want their email/calendar available when they're disconnected, or for people who work with attachments of any size (it gets it from the server once then goes from the PC after that). It's OK for collecting mail when dialled in too, but generally it'll try to connect to the POA for things without asking which can get annoying. If you use proxy too, it'll let you try to connect to anther mailbox (in the same way as online mode) without thinking about the state it's in.

      I'd say it's also useful if the POA or server goes down, but, well, it doesn't happen ;-)

      Remote mode gives you more choice about what you cache (like not keeping a local copy of that 20000-message shared folder) which keeps syncs shorter and it has a clear distinction between being not connected and syncing. Far better for field people who want to dial up, get their mail, disconnect, read it all, do their replies and sync again. Features that won't work away from the network (like proxy) aren't available. In caching mode every time they hit "send" it'll try to find the POA to get it out as quick as possible, in remote it'll wait for the next sync.

      No idea how well or otherwise Outlook handles this (I've only used it in internet-only mode) but I'd have thought, or hope, that it would have something similar.

      I like Groupwise a lot, just wish they'd sort out the clunky, ugly client - Outlook may be a virus-prone bloaty bit of software but it does some things really well.

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