Over Loaded MS Exchange 2003 Server

Client based in London with a staff of 10 and a huge MS Exchange DB of 72Gb
The client produces catalogues each week for distribution in the national press. The process for the design of the catalogues and printing of the catalogues is spread around different companies leading to a lot of email traffic with very large 10-20+ Mb email attachments.

4 mailboxes were over 10 Gb in size.

Outlook offline folders (OST files) are not designed to be effective when over 2Gb in size and when they grow much larger they will become slow, unresponsive and will corrupt leading to Ms Outlook not closing properly and also leading to an OST repair the next time Outlook is opened. This is very time consuming and frustrating for the customer.

For PCs based on the LAN we simply turned off Outlook caching which sped up outlook and prevented OST corruption. However, the MD accesses the network from his home in London, his home in South Africa and from China on regular business trips. Although he accesses his work PC using remote control software he also wants to be able to work locally when not online. This has made his 18Gb mailbox a massive problem. In the event of needing to create a new OST file we have had to synchronise 18Gbs of data across the internet.

Solution:
After consultation with the client Support Tree recommended implementing GFI Mail Archiver v6
Reasons:

* Cost effective
* Easy centralised backup
* Fast email retrieval
* Accessible through a web browser.
* Seamless MS Outlook integration

The cost of online email archiving is still prohibitively expensive.

The client already has an SQL 2005 database which is needed for GFI Mail Archiver v6 for databases greater than 2Gb. This helped to make the solution more cost effective as we only needed to add disk space and the GFI software to implement the system.

Result
The client now has an 8Gb Exchange database. Mail Archiver has speeded up mail access and now the client does not have issues with corrupting OST files.