Exchange experiences with Entourage clients, large mailboxes?

[Dave Pooser]

[This was first posted in the microsoft.public.exchange group and got
no responses. So if you've seen it before, this is why. Any suggestions
on other places to post this would be appreciated.]

I'm currently using a standards-based SMTP/POP/IMAP server (CommuniGate
Pro) with a mostly-Mac client base using Entourage 2004 SP2. I'm
considering moving to Exchange for groupware capabilities and to take
advantage of the Exchange "ecosystem" including support for handhelds,
possible PBX integration, etc. A few questions:

1) Entourage as an Exchange client: Can somebody who's using Entourage
2004 SP2 with Exchange comment on how "nicely" it plays with Exchange?
I'm mostly interested in email and shared calendaring for about 70
users. What's speed like, what's stability like, what sorts of things
will still require Outlook and Windows?

2) Big mailboxes: Most of my users have 2-4GB of mail, typically with
one or two 1GB+ folders and then a dozen or so significantly smaller
folders. We regularly send/receive email messages with attachments in
the 2-20MB range. Is any of this likely to cause performance or
stability issues? Please note that I'm not looking for "it should..."
sorts of statements, but for "Yes we're doing that, and this is the
performance we're seeing...." or "We tried that and here's what we
found..." I can speculate just fine on my own. :^)

3) Security issues: Not wishing to start a flamewar here, but one of my
concerns about moving a mission-critical server to Windows is security.
My plan is to use an Exim box to process incoming mail before it ever
reaches the server, but I'm concerned about the potential for other
exploits. How many of you are in organizations that put the Exchange
server on the public Internet vs. restrict access to users on the VPN?

4) Ecosystem: What's the coolest thing that makes you happy you chose
Exchange? The "I'd gnaw my arm off before I gave this up" Exchange
feature or third-party add-on?

TIA for any answers you can provide!

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi Dave,

1) Entourage as an Exchange client: Can somebody who's using Entourage
2004 SP2 with Exchange comment on how "nicely" it plays with Exchange?
I'm mostly interested in email and shared calendaring for about 70
users. What's speed like, what's stability like, what sorts of things
will still require Outlook and Windows?

Though I didn't like Exchange support in Entourage X so much, I'm much
happier with ENtourage 2004. Most of the Exchange features are now
supported and for our size e-mail accounts, (50 MB :-< ) it works rather
well.

However... for larger accounts, I wouldn't know... The initial setup
WILL take forever since all the content of the mailboxes will have to be
cached for the first time. Categories for address book and calendar will
not be synched to the server. You won't be able to backup Excahnge data
to an archive (at least directly) either. Finally, I wish Entourage had
an auto-archive function for Exchange the way Outlook does... THat would
save me a lot of time cleaning up the account :-(

I have no real idea how fast day to day sync is for very large accounts
though you aways have the option to only auto-syc the first xxx kb of
each e-mail to speed things up.

2) Big mailboxes: Most of my users have 2-4GB of mail, typically with
one or two 1GB+ folders and then a dozen or so significantly smaller
folders.

Yeah... according to my standards, that's pretty big... I have noe
xperience with this type of mailbox size.

We regularly send/receive email messages with attachments in
the 2-20MB range. Is any of this likely to cause performance or
stability issues? Please note that I'm not looking for "it should..."

I often receive and save 5-10MB e-mails (not really convenient for a
50MB account :-( ) and that's not really a problem. File transfer is
fast and stability is not an issue on my Mac anyway. I suspect that the
performances of the servers are pretty important in this regard. I was
on an older server a while ago and I had trouble sending large
attachment. To workaround the issue, I create a "boggus" POP account in
ENtourage (with the same reply to address) and used Postfix on my own
Mac as my SMTP server. All I had to do was to select this alternate
account to send large attachments. It was reallllllly fast and
efficient. No such problem since my account migrated to a more recent
and up to date server.

[...]

3) Security issues: Not wishing to start a flamewar here, but one of my
concerns about moving a mission-critical server to Windows is security.
My plan is to use an Exim box to process incoming mail before it ever
reaches the server, but I'm concerned about the potential for other
exploits. How many of you are in organizations that put the Exchange
server on the public Internet vs. restrict access to users on the VPN?

Entourage is getting mails through OWA (Outlook Web Access, or webmail -
going through WebDAV). If OWA is being supported through SSL, then it
sounds rather good to me already. On top of that you could require VPN
access. That's not the case where I work.

4) Ecosystem: What's the coolest thing that makes you happy you chose
Exchange? The "I'd gnaw my arm off before I gave this up" Exchange
feature or third-party add-on?

I wouldn't phrase it like that, but I like the fact that it's an
integrated system that provides support for e-mail, address book and
calendar in one place that's accessible from any of our computers. I
guess delegation is pretty cool to, but I personnally have no use for
it.

Corentin