Trouble with Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook

Yes, I know we're a little behind. We have not yet migrated to Office 2007 or Exchange Server 2007. Even though we are a small business with only about 100 seats that's still a big financial commitment. Maybe we'll take the plunge next year. But for today, we are still running a very reliable Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with SP2. Other than needing to occasionally add storage space, it has been working just fine in our organization for the last three years. Management likes that and so do I.

One thing that management doesn't like is Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook 2003. I don't know why it's so much trouble for them. It works fine for me - always has. We may have a scenario that taxes the capabilities of Cached Exchange Mode to the max. In case you don't know, Cached Exchange Mode is simply Microsoft speak for Offline Folders - a local cache of what's in your mailbox on the Exchange Server. We only use it for employees in remote offices or home offices of execs.

Here is the scenario: Executive A is a high-volume, high-density email user in a far city. He easily sends and receives several hundred emails each day, most of them with large attachments of photos or PDFs with embedded photos. We're talking 5 to 10MB of attachments on many of his daily emails. I have never figured out why it has become so acceptable to send such large attachments. It just kind of evolved over the past few years.

Our industry happens to be aircraft sales but the same scenario could exist in Real Estate, automobiles, yachts or any business that needs to send lots of photos back and forth. The executive in question also uses multiple computers - one in the office and one in the home office, both on the East Coast of the U.S. Both his computers are configured to get his email from our Exchange Server on the West Coast of the U.S. using Outlook 2003 and Cached Exchange Mode.

The executive will work all day on the office computer, log off and then work all evening on the home office computer. The complaint is that it will sometimes take hours for synchronization of the offline folders to take place when first firing up one or the other to check his email. He reports that some emails are delayed by many hours while the cache is playing catch up. His mailbox size is over 7GB with over 32,000 individual email messages in multiple folders.

The far city does not have an Exchange Server. We only have the one on the West Coast. All email flows here and then out to the remote office. The remote office is connected via a VPN - a full T1 line here and a 3.1Mbs / 768Kbs DSL line there. The connection speed on the remote home office is a modest 1.5Mbs / 384Kbs DSL with no VPN. Most of the trouble seems to be when connected at the remote home office. Outlook is configured to get email via RPC over HTTP.

I know this reads like an MCSE exam question. Besides cutting his mailbox size down to a more manageable size, what would you recommend?

Update: I posted this same entry on my Tech Republic blog and received many good suggestions and recommendations there. That's why I post most of my stuff on Tech Republic these days. It has a much larger readership of tech guys like me.

External logo for Outlook Signature blocks

This is real geeky stuff but it's what I do all day. We have had an ongoing problem with logos in Outlook Signatures being broken or missing. This is especially a problem for the executive staff who do lots of email from home. We'll set up their signature block to point to a local copy or a server copy of our logo.

Then somehow that logo will get deleted or moved or a mapped drive will fail to map on logon or something else will cause it to not work. There's nothing more unattractive and unprofessional than receiving an email from the CEO with a big red X where the company logo should be. In fact it can be downright embarrassing when trying to impress a new client.

So we decided to point the signature block address to a copy of our logo stored on our external web server. Then we just make sure that we have set up the signature properly on whatever machine the employee uses to access Outlook email - at work or at home or both. It even works great for our road warriors who live out of their laptops.

It really is quite simple. The signature block is simple HTML code. We don't like to create the signature directly in Outlook because it bloats the file and creates subfolders for the logo - or rather for a copy of the logo. So we create a lean and mean piece of code with an embedded link to the logo on the web server and put it in the right folder on the workstations.

By the way, that folder location is Docs & Settings \ Username \ Application Data \ Microsoft \ Signatures. Once you place the HTML file in the folder and turn on the signature block from within Outlook it automatically creates the .txt and .rtf versions of the file that it requires. Of course Outlook must be set to use HTML format when creating or responding to emails in order for the logo to show up.

Here is picture of the sample code that worked for us.

I'm beginning to see a pattern here

It seems like every entry I've made so far has something to do with Outlook and Exchange. Email issues are taking up more of my time each day than anything else. It's not that there is anything wrong with the email server - it's more the user expectations that are the issue.

I received an email from a remote user who said he couldn't receive any email on his laptop. Knowing that he carries a mobile email device I emailed him back and asked him to describe the symptoms. He wrote back, "it's just sitting there with this blue bar saying it's downloading."

"Hmmm...could it be that someone sent you an email with a large attachment? Maybe you should just wait it out," I suggested. "Nah, that couldn't be it," he said. "It has never taken this long before to download my email." Of course he knows nothing about the connection speeds at his hotel.

I receive the same email from him every five minutes, "Isn't there something you can do to speed it up?" I'm glad I've trained my users to use email for everything but the most urgent tech support requests. Otherwise he would have heard the exasperation in my voice.

Finally, he says he is going to go to supper and will be away from the keyboard for awhile. I tell him to be sure to leave the computer running and Outlook open. Maybe he will be surprised and his email download will finish by the time he gets back. I don't hear from him again.

Curiosity causes me to shoot him an email the next day (this morning). "Did you ever get all your email last night?" His response, "Yeah, I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Did you do something on your end to speed it up?" Sigh. It just doesn't do any good to try to explain.

The end-user is always right

I got a call today from a user complaining that she couldn't see one of our company contacts in her email address list when composing a new email in Outlook. At first she thought the person in charge of keeping the contact lists up to date had failed in her duties. I was able to see the contact OK and wondered why she couldn't.

It turns out that each Outlook client must be configured at the user workstation to include public contacts as Outlook address lists. Apparently she hadn't done this. Just right click on the public contact folder, select properties, Outlook address book tab, then check the box for 'Show this folder as an email address book'. Do the same for subfolders.

When I advised her of the procedure to do this, she asked, "Did I do something wrong?" I replied, "Of course not. I should have set this up for you in advance." Sigh. That's what computer guys are for, right? I suppose I should put stuff like this on our intranet. It keeps coming up over and over again. But then nobody reads the intranet even when I tell them the answers are there.