Baris
Tue Oct 28 09:13:36 CST 2003
You should then definitely consider Outlook 2003 - Exchange 2003 and MAPI
protocol. This will give you the best possible experience.
You may deepen your research by finding documents about Outlook 2003
describing the improvements over previous versions. Many, many new features
exist to eliminate the bytes on the wire.
Outlook 2003 also has something called cached mode. It will transparently
switch between online/offline modes without hanging the UI or having to let
user quit from Outlook. While in cached mode, Outlook will keep a priority
list of top-user folders; then when next time it connects to server, those
top-folders will be sync'd first.
Give it a try, make sure product versions are all 2003.
Oh one last thing, if you must have Outlook connecting to Exchange over one
single port, implement RPC over HTTP feature. It requires base OS be Windows
2003 on servers, and Windows XP SP1 on the client. If you have more
questions, write back.
Baris.
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
<anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:0c4501c39d56$35239ae0$a401280a@phx.gbl...
> >-----Original Message-----
> >Please clarify Exchange and Outlook versions.
> >
> >Baris.
>
> We're having the same problem with Outlook 2000 and
> Outlook 2002. There doesn't seem to be any difference
> between how these two handle IMAP accounts. It's not
> really a "problem", it's just a behaviour we don't want
> Outlook to engage in. If we only had 20 folders it would
> all be fine, it's just that we have a lot more and Outlook
> seems to spend most of its time trying to keep up to date
> with the folder list. And there's no way of preventing it
> that I know of.
>
> Haven't tried Outlook 2003 yet but we don't have a copy
> anyway, and I certainly haven't come across any lists of
> new features that address any of these issues.
>
> Outlook Express seems to be far more sensible in terms of
> how it handles IMAP.
>
> Ideally we would have an IMAP client which synchronised
> folder lists level by level as we navigate through them -
> i.e. every time we double-clicked into a sub-folder it
> would check that it had an up-to-date list of its
> subfolders. And only if we tell it to.
>
> As for Exchange server version, well that doesn't apply
> because we don't have one yet... so assume the most
> recent. And we won't be getting Exchange server unless we
> know it can handle the job better than MDaemon :)
>
> What it really comes down to is whether the way that
> Outlook handles Exchange accounts (and in particular
> folder listings) is going to lead to the same type of
> problem or get around it. Am I correct in understanding
> that Outlook uses a protocol called MAPI to talk to
> Exchange? Even if I read the protocol specification, I've
> got no guarantee as to how Outlook will handle such a deep
> folder hierarchy without trying it for myself, or getting
> better advice from one of you.
>
> Money is not an issue here, Exchange will cost six times
> as much to deploy as MDaemon, but I'm not going to back it
> unless I have a specific answer as to how it's going to
> get around our problem with the Outlook clients.
>
> At the moment my whole attitude is to break everything up
> into multiple accounts which are under 1000 folders. That
> way it would be bearable - not fast, but useable. It's the
> process of having to download a list of 20,000 folders
> every time we try to do something that makes it painful.
> If I split everything into multiple IMAP accounts (or
> perhaps even multiple Outlook accounts with different IMAP
> directory roots) I can lighten the load on the client
> side - Outlook will only need to retrieve a subset of the
> folder listings every time I ask it to do something.
>
> Any advice from anyone with any experience deploying
> anything remotely on the scale that I'm talking about
> would be vastly appreaciated.
>
> Kudos.
>
> P.S. I might point out that twice in the last 24 hours
> Microsoft's Windows servers have failed me when I've
> either made HTTP requests or tried to post to them. One of
> them was even some sort of strange .NET error telling me
> how to reconfigure the server to prevent the error.
>
> cb
> --
>
>