Introduction
I regularly meet with customers and discuss their Exchange Server architecture. Two topics frequently come up so I thought I'd discuss them with everybody and give my perspe...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Well I couldn't disagree with you more on the Mailbox size issue. You're reasoning may be sound from a technical point of view, but from a user point of view, you're so far offbase it isn't funny anymore. 1GByte of e-mail is minimum from my point of view. I work for a government and handle several dossiers that are high in e-mail volume. One dossier alone generated 80MB in e-mail in 6 months. 3 years of work amounts to 1 Gigabyte. Much of that stuff stays relevant. I can try to archive it away in a document management system or to a central disk, but that costs serious time. A tool like desktop search will allow it to be manageable and searchable. (Will this be included in Outlook 2007?)
If I throw it away I probably break the archiving law and some companies probably SOX. If I archive every e-mail that might become relevant later on even with 30 seconds a day that is easily amounts 10-30 minutes per day. All in all I need my e-mail to be effective. Questions I regularly answer on the basis of mails is:
- Has so and so ever asked a question on this?
- They say that they never agreed to that sentene being included in the paper. Is that true?
- What papers did you use to write the drafts for that project 2 years ago? we're due for the official review
Some of that you can answer with the official archive, but the e-mail box answers it in much more detail.
So Ross, if you really want to give your customers (being the enduser and not the IT-department) what they need, you build Exchange to be capable of managing mailboxes with at least 3GByte of storage per user and max 5 second search times. Don't build a system that limits the user right from the start, let the only thing that limits the user be his budget (and I mean hardware budget, not MS License budget)
For more on my point of view on this and why company wiki's might help out see http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com and http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com/2006/04/knowledge-management-problems-in-large.html
If I throw it away I probably break the archiving law and some companies probably SOX. If I archive every e-mail that might become relevant later on even with 30 seconds a day that is easily amounts 10-30 minutes per day. All in all I need my e-mail to be effective. Questions I regularly answer on the basis of mails is:
- Has so and so ever asked a question on this?
- They say that they never agreed to that sentene being included in the paper. Is that true?
- What papers did you use to write the drafts for that project 2 years ago? we're due for the official review
Some of that you can answer with the official archive, but the e-mail box answers it in much more detail.
So Ross, if you really want to give your customers (being the enduser and not the IT-department) what they need, you build Exchange to be capable of managing mailboxes with at least 3GByte of storage per user and max 5 second search times. Don't build a system that limits the user right from the start, let the only thing that limits the user be his budget (and I mean hardware budget, not MS License budget)
For more on my point of view on this and why company wiki's might help out see http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com and http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com/2006/04/knowledge-management-problems-in-large.html