Corporate Offline Exchange Best Practices

A

Austin Lau

Dear all,
Let me start by explaining our situation. We have Exchange 2000 on a server and are presently using Outlook XP/2002 as our client. We use Exchange for collaboration and POP for email (i.e. third party). Many of our staff are consultants and must work offline. They require quick access to their information, i.e. email, meetings, etc, without having to logon to Exchange (i.e. sync with Exchange). We access Exchange through VPN. We have used the Send/Receive Groups setting to check only POP mail offline and sync only the calendar (for collaboration purposes). However the road warriors must be able to see if there are any meeting requests and sync their calendars so individuals at the office knows where they are. So they must synchronize frequently. At the moment while they are on the road 52K is the fastest connection speed they are going to get, and as we all know this is the most optimistic speed through dialup.

Therefore my question is the following. There must be thousands upon thousands of road warriors out there struggling to collaborate with Exchange, how to corporations deal with providing the most efficient practices to simply collect email and collaboration. I'm sure those corporations would like to know exactly where their employees are as well therefore would like them to synchronize their calendars. Can anyone give any suggestions, or directions where I can find examples of some best practices. Are we doing things right? Would offering dialin services tied into the domain help with performance?

We do not want to use OWA as an alternative because that brings a security issue into the mix (e.g. IIS).

I refuse to believe that we road warriors are limited until better technology is provided to assist in connection times.

Thank you all!
 

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