Entourage & Exchange Best Practices

[Craig Roberts]

Hi all

We have used Entourage and Exchange for over 3 years now and still find
that, amongst our 90 Entourage users, we are usually rebuilding one person's
Database every other day (sometimes more often). This has been deemed by
upper management to be a waste of our time.

If it was not for our need for calendar/email delegation I would use Apple's
Mail and Kerio, but latter doesn't support it last time I looked.

So questions about Entourage and making it work for us:
- We have mailboxes >5GB - can anyone confirm the theoretical max for
Entourage 2004 and 2008 databases (if different)?
- What's the max items in a person's Inbox? Is there any actually evidence
of problems occurring if there are too many, say 1000?
- For those with experience in adminstering Entourage 2004 and 2008 with
Exchange 2003 SP2 do you have Best Practice advice to avoid these problems
(there's Sysadmin and Users Best Practice of course)
- Has anyone managed to find Shared Calendar/Email in an email Server other
than Exchange?

If anyone from the Mactopia crew happen upon this thread, then please
explain why corruptions occur in the database and rather than just repair it
everyday can we have some tools to find out what the problem was. We're
techies as well.

Thanks for your help.


Regards
Craig

 

[William Smith [MVP]]

Hi Craig!

My comments are inline with yours.

We have used Entourage and Exchange for over 3 years now and still find
that, amongst our 90 Entourage users, we are usually rebuilding one person's
Database every other day (sometimes more often). This has been deemed by
upper management to be a waste of our time.

We have over 250 users and I think only one has actually ever attempted
rebuilding his Database. Our mailbox limit is only 100MB.

First, I don't recommend rebuilding the Database when using Entourage
with Exchange. A problem during the rebuild could erase data. Then that
data will be authoritative and replicate to the Exchange Server.

I always recommend either recreating the identity or simply deleting and
recreating the account in the same identity and letting everything sync
again. This can be a pain for large mailboxes but it's the safest method.

So questions about Entourage and making it work for us:
- We have mailboxes >5GB - can anyone confirm the theoretical max for
Entourage 2004 and 2008 databases (if different)?

Entourage has no set size limit. Instead it has an item limit. I believe
it's about 1,000,000 items. That may not seem like much but you'd have
to collect messages (never trashing) for many many years before you hit
that mark.

- What's the max items in a person's Inbox? Is there any actually evidence
of problems occurring if there are too many, say 1000?

The Inbox is special. It has no max item limit, however, it is
synchronized far more frequently than other mail folders. Keep this
folder lean and clean. Do not create sub-folders. They would simply be
part of the problem.

Instead, create mail folders at the same level as the Inbox, Deleted
items, Sent Items, etc., and move as many messages out of the Inbox as
possible.

- For those with experience in adminstering Entourage 2004 and 2008 with
Exchange 2003 SP2 do you have Best Practice advice to avoid these problems
(there's Sysadmin and Users Best Practice of course)

Have a look at my blog post for optimizing Entourage for use with Exchange:

"Optimize Entourage to better work with Exchange"
<http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/03/optimize_entourage_to_better_work_with_exchange.html>


Hope this helps!

--

bill

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