Outlook, Entourage, Exchange - STORAGE LIMITS

[Cyber City]

Outlook/Entourage Storage Limits
Hey everybody,

I work for a small business. We're supporting users who are almost entirely
using outlook 2003/2007 (or Entourage 2004) and exchange 2003. I am looking
to get a consensus on size and volume limits for Outlook.

I am interested in finding the following information

1.) Maximum recommended number of items per folder
2.) Maximum recommended number of nested folders
3.) Maximum recommended overall mailbox size
4.) Maximum recommended item/attachment size (for both incoming and outgoing
emails)

I am interested in this info both as it applies to Exchange 2003 and 2007,
as well as the folliwing apps:

Outlook 2003
Outlook 2007
Entourage 2004
Entourage 2008

I have had issues with large hosted exchange mailboxes interfacing with
Entourage (2004). I have also had users to have more than 2,000 items in any
folder (especially inbox, deleted, etc) slowing down or working poorly as a
result.

Beyond that, we all know that there can be issues with mailboxes that have
too many items in them (see <a
href="http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/03/14/395229.aspx">THIS
ARTICLE</A>) I've also seen mailboxes act finicky over roughly 12GB.

Can anyone point us in the right direction? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[gerryR]

Are you looking for technical limits or just guidelines/ suggestions?

How important is email to the users jobs? Do they have to keep sent and
received email as a record (eg for legal reasons)? Is there a seperate
filing/ archiving solution in place for peoples email? Whay type of emails
would most users be sending (eg text only or large attachemnts)?

gr

 

[Cyber City]

Are you looking for technical limits or just guidelines/ suggestions?

I'm looking for suggestions that keep all of these disparate parts of the
equation (entourage, outlook, exchange) running smoothly.

How important is email to the users jobs? Do they have to keep sent and
received email as a record (eg for legal reasons)? Is there a seperate
filing/ archiving solution in place for peoples email? Whay type of emails
would most users be sending (eg text only or large attachemnts)?

Email, I think, is pretty much integral for the jobs in question. We run an
IT consulting shop for small businesses, and we build exchange servers for a
lot of our clients. They don't HAVE to keep received mail as a record, for
legal reasons, but clients tend to like to have their emails all in one
place. In the past, we have come to them every 6 months or so and archived
emails to keep the mailboxes around 1-2GB. But I think we want to impose hard
and fast limits, rather than just arbitrary limits based on people's issues.

A lot of our clients are art galleries, so they send a lot of jpeg
attachments, but we have a policy filter set up that limits them from sending
or receiving any emails over 10 MB in size.

 

[gerryR]

We're currently planning a massive overhaul of our Exchange system.

We swithched to exchange about 2 years ago and unfortunatly didn't apply any
limits etc. Its got to the stage where people have multiple GB of mail but
with the nature of our work we can't tell them to just delete them. We also
want to avoid the hassle of archiving to .pst for example, as soon as you do
that you know they're going to need a mail in the archive. We have over 250
people in the organisation so it would get quite messay and time consumeing.

What we've decided to do is use the public folder system to create a folder
structure based on our job numbers. Here ALL job related mail will be
stored centrally so there will be no need to have large mailboxes. We
intend to impost a 1GB mailbox limit once this is done. Its true, the
public folder will get very big but it will be easier and cleaner to archive
a full job sohlud the need arise.

As it stands, we have some users with over 10GB of mail, they sometimes get
corrupt and the .ost needs to be rebuilt (which takes a while!) but to be
honest it doesn't happen too often. Once we get a system in place where all
project related mail os stored seperatly (and to be honest this mail is
really all that concerns us) we can see no problem with imposing a 1GB max
mailbox (maybe even too big?)

gr