Outlook 2003 Caching and Roaming Users

[Minties]

We use cached exchange mode throughout our organisation which has a large
number of slow WAN links. We have roaming profiles enabled for all of our
users, who are predominantly desktop based, to allow them to login anywhere
in the network.

We'd like to retain the benefits of Outlook caching when they are on their
regular desktops, but force them to use online mode when they move to another
machine to prevent a full .OST file being created each time they roam.

Can anyone suggest a way in which this can be forced through group policy,
or in some way that requires minimal user education. We have considered
educating these users to use Outlook Web Access only, but this is NOT ideal.

 

[Greg Mansius [MSFT]]

Try putting a link to a terminal server on their desktop. When they roam to
another machine, they need to know to use this link and then launch Outlook
in the TS session.

You could also build a "smart" login script that lays down a cached mode
..prf file for "primary" machine and an online mode .prf file for "roaming"
machines. How the login script determines the difference between "primary"
machine and "roaming" machine would be the tricky part.

Group policy doesn't have this kind of logic, so if you enable cached mode
via group policy, they will get the policy applied regardless of the machine
they log into. The cached mode policy is "user" based so it's applied to the
user and not the machine.

Hope this helps.
--
Thanks

greg mansius [MSFT]
Microsoft Office Outlook Support

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