So you've heard some folks saying large mailboxes are a good idea. Your users have been screaming for mailboxes with more than 1GB quotas. Your management wants you to be able to recover from outages...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your comment.
Ahhh….No. Archiving is not bad. Stub files are bad. Just like PST files are bad. :)
I know the pain you are dealing with. I’ve had customers with 70+GB mailboxes in the past. In these circumstances the best you can do is explain the issues and help steer things in the right direction. A 32+GB mailbox effectively means you need to be in online mode (unless you are working in a well architected OST scenario which only syncs a small number of folders). As a result, the performance costs to the server tend to be significant. Generally, most customers who have mailboxes like this also have regulatory compliance requirements. As I point out in the paper, that is a valid reason to deploy an archival solution.
Additionally, I would suggest that many users that have mailboxes like this are misusing the resources they’ve been given. In some of these cases, an additional tactic that should be employed is discussing their usage patterns and exploring other options to see if an alternative solution for them may be a better fit. For illustration, many users like this tend to use their mailboxes as a version control system for large PowerPoint slide-decks and the like. Retaining 50 different versions of their 70MB “How I like to bump off my mailbox quotas” presentation is probably not the best use of your organizations storage infrastructure. Steering that user to a document version control system is probably a better fit.
Tom.
Thanks for your comment.
Ahhh….No. Archiving is not bad. Stub files are bad. Just like PST files are bad. :)
I know the pain you are dealing with. I’ve had customers with 70+GB mailboxes in the past. In these circumstances the best you can do is explain the issues and help steer things in the right direction. A 32+GB mailbox effectively means you need to be in online mode (unless you are working in a well architected OST scenario which only syncs a small number of folders). As a result, the performance costs to the server tend to be significant. Generally, most customers who have mailboxes like this also have regulatory compliance requirements. As I point out in the paper, that is a valid reason to deploy an archival solution.
Additionally, I would suggest that many users that have mailboxes like this are misusing the resources they’ve been given. In some of these cases, an additional tactic that should be employed is discussing their usage patterns and exploring other options to see if an alternative solution for them may be a better fit. For illustration, many users like this tend to use their mailboxes as a version control system for large PowerPoint slide-decks and the like. Retaining 50 different versions of their 70MB “How I like to bump off my mailbox quotas” presentation is probably not the best use of your organizations storage infrastructure. Steering that user to a document version control system is probably a better fit.
Tom.