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IT Administrators are familiar with the complaints. “Outlook seems sluggish.” “Why does it take so long to sort items in my inbox?”
If these complaints from your users sound familiar, the culprit may be too many items in a folder.
For users running Microsoft Office Outlook in cached mode, the problem generally manifests itself in sluggishness of the client, as Outlook sifts through large amounts of data, resulting in a dissatisfactory e-mail experience for users.
So how many items are too many items in a folder? Really, from an Exchange best practice point of view, you don’t want to see more than 20,000 messages in a single folder. And that is particularly true for a critical path folder, including the Inbox, Contacts, Deleted Items, Calendar, or Sent Items folders.
The immediate question, what steps can a user with a large number of items in their mailbox take to reduce his item count? The easiest is solution is to enable Auto Archive in Outlook.
As an IT Administrator, you can encourage your users to enable Auto Archiving. The Microsoft Support Knowledgebase provides an article with instructions for setting up Auto Archiving in Outlook 2010, 2007, and 2003.
You also might want to implement a mail retention policy for your organization, which will auto delete items that are older than the limit in the policy. You can open a support request with Microsoft Online Services Technical Support to set up a retention policy for your organization.
Seriously? Auto-archiving is a terrible feature - especially when paired with Exchange Online. One of the main benefits to Online services is that all your mail is stored in the cloud and that you're not tied to a particular computer. But as soon as you enable auto-archiving, you have to start managing PST files that are created in Outlook. And if someone moves to a new computer, you need to remember to find/move all their archived PST folders that have been created. I specifically turn off auto-archiving for my customers, and I find it hard to believe that you're *encouraging* people to archive their mail *from* the cloud *to* their local computers...
While I agree that >20k items is an issue, I strongly disagree that Auto Archive is the answer, because then you have to worry about how to backup the PSTs that are generated. Why not instead encourage users to create subfolders (perhaps by time periods, such as year) and move messages into them?
Autoarchive uses pst files and many companies restrict the use of pst files for both compliance management and performance issues.
"One of the main benefits to Online services is that all your mail is stored in the cloud and that you're not tied to a particular computer."
Don't blame Exchange Online for an Outlook limitation -- specifically Outlook 2007 limitations. Outlook 2007 is terrible at handling huge amounts of items (and isn't that great in handling in downloading shared folders in cached mode, either). As an MSOL engineer, I am constantly working with folks whose O2007 clients are bogging down, often to the point of the dreaded "not responding". In almost every case, it's due either to over 20K+ items in a folder or large shared folders.
Not to sell MS products here, but Outlook 2010 handles this issue much better, along with many other thing (Office Communicator presence, handling EWS requests, multiple Exchange profiles, etc.) But we're still trying to get folks to upgrade from the creaky O2003, so you know how that goes :(
I completely agree with the recent comments. Auto-archive is absolutely not the answer, for the same reasons mentioned above. I'm pretty disappointed with the actual content of this post. How about issues related to conference rooms, shared distribution lists, or address books to name a couple issues worth discussing.
I agree that managing PST's can be nightmare down the road. I think a great solution would be to offer our customers Exchange Hosted Archive. It's a very affordable, reliable solution and is a part of the Microsoft Online Services offering.
@scharmers I'm not blaming Exchange Online for anything - if the problem is with a certain version of Outlook then Microsoft should be doing all it can to get people to upgrade to a more recent version, or else give guidance on how to structure folders better. But telling customers to archive their mail to local PST folders is absolutely the wrong advice to give, especially when you're trying to encourage people to move to the cloud. It's good to see that the other commenters agree with me, but I'd love to hear a response from the post author.
Thanks for the great comments! You've raised some important points. Our engineering team is monitoring this conversation and we'll update this post in a day or two with new/additional information.
Hello from Kansas City. On the road, so a little late checking in on the post and comments. Agree with @JimGlynn, good to see the discussion on this topic and the variety of opinions. On the topic of opinions, you certainly have strong opinions about Auto Archive and about where data should be stored. When it comes to the cloud, you’re definitely all in. Good to hear your thoughts.
About those strong opinions for Auto Archive, since we’ve heard from the non-fans, I’ll step to the feature’s defense to point out a couple of advantages. First, it’s easy to set up and use, so it’s the quickest way to clean up an inbox. Second, the archive is available on your local machine, So it’s available even when your machine is not connected to the cloud.
@Dave points out that the local copy of the archive causes problems for large organizations that have compliance and data management requirements. And @stuartm points out the need to move the local archive file if the user moves to a new computer. Both are valid points.
For smaller organizations (and we have healthy small business community using Exchange Online) that don’t have compliance requirements and a small user population to manage, Auto Archive can be a good solution for managing mailboxes and improving Outlook performance.
For alternatives to Auto Archive, @Dan Pitre mentions Exchange Hosted Archive, which is an excellent cloud-based solution for message archiving, and it provides some terrific tools to help with compliance activities. I’ll second Dan’s suggestion. Exchange Hosted Archive may not be the right solution for all businesses, but medium and larger organizations should give it a look.
The other point in the original post that hasn’t received much attention: mail retention policy. Every organization, especially those medium to large organizations, should have a defined retention policy for messages. And our Technical Support teams can help you implement your defined policy.
Our engineering team will have additional responses for you on this topic. My final thought, mailbox management can take many forms, there is not a one-size fits-all solution and many paths to the same goal. Thanks for your comments, and keep them coming.
I run a small business with 3 employees, and autoarchive is absolutely a horrible alternative and also a potentially disastrous one. In the office, we all use Outlook in cached mode. We all also have Outlook on our home machines, some have in Online mode, other have cached mode. We also frequently access outlook from other computers with browser interface.
One employee connected to Exchange from a fresh new laptop with Outlook, and by default and without his knowledge, Outlook started secretly to Autoarchive his sent items and Inbox. It took several days to figure out where all the e-mail went he couldn't find when searching outlook in the office. A laptop is also seldom backed up so if that hard drive had crashed, all older e-mail would be gone.
Not to be able to access e-mails more than one year back from anywgere would absolutely not work for us and I bet not for millions of other business. The default autoarchive functionality for Exchange connections in Outlook is just so bad.I find it just ridiculous that Microsoft engineers are not able to come up with a solution that lets us keep our e-mail in our Inbox where it belongs, instead imposing random restrictions. I urge you to work harder to make the Outlook Inbox responsive no matter how many e-mails there are.
Exchange 2010 features Archive Mailbox which addresses the problem. I am hoping that come September when the new Exchange Online update is rumored to be released this feature will be included. Intermedia has been offering a hosted version of exchange 2010 for several months - how and why they released it before Microsoft itself did is a bit of a mystery, but I have heard that integrated archiving "has been confirmed" (by whom?) to be a part of the next release.
richfrombechtle.wordpress.com/.../microsoft-bpos-more-new-features
I've been patiently and frustratingly waiting for MS to upgrade BPOS to Exchange 2010 so my company can decide whether to take a serious look at the cloud or start the long painful journey towards on-prem Exchange 2010; the "early" sneak peak of hosted Ex2010 has gone from an original rumor of June, to August/Sept and now all I'm hearing is Q4, which will probably end up being December 31st the way MS seems to be creeping along.
I think MS needs to delay the "We're all in." campaign until they've got a cloud offering worth moving to.
On the topic of auto-archive, I'm not really sure what the point of that would be in regards to hosted Exchange which offers up to 25GB mailboxes now and more than enough space to hold all the email you need without having to archive, heck we have 4TB of pst files on our file server and one of our most anticipated hopes for a cloud move would be to migrate those back to users mailboxes so they have access to all their mail all the time and no more confounded corrupt pst's.
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