Workaround for Entourage 2008 WSE shortcoming and a genuine benefitfor everyone.

[alan]

Well, I've found a fudge to fix EWS's failure:

As I've explained before, I've run into a problem where Entourage 2008
Web Services Edition won't work properly with an identity that resides
on a network home folder. The problem is that neither My Day nor MS
Office Reminders will launch after Entourage has been launched. With
files located on a local disk, it works fine.

So I hit on the idea of *simulating* the existence of local files. I
created a disk image, mounted it, moved "Microsoft User Data" onto the
mounted image and put an alias to the folder back in the user's
Documents folder. Everything works as it should, *and* performance is
much better as well.

Not only that, but because I'm using the new sparse bundle format, the
actual disk image "file" that needs to be backed up in order to backup
the user's email is in reality a directory containing many separate
8MB "band" files. So instead of a large database file that needs to be
backed up in its entirety every night, the server only needs to back
up the individual bands that have changed. Given that some of the
users I support have Database files in the 2 - 4 GB range, this is
going to save us a lot.

So:

Better backups.

Better performance.

Fixes Microsoft's failure.

And my users are happy.

 

[alan]

Well, I've found a fudge to fix EWS's failure:

As I've explained before, I've run into a problem where Entourage 2008
Web Services Edition won't work properly with an identity that resides
on a network home folder. The problem is that neither My Day nor MS
Office Reminders will launch after Entourage has been launched. With
files located on a local disk, it works fine.

So I hit on the idea of *simulating* the existence of local files. I
created a disk image, mounted it, moved "Microsoft User Data" onto the
mounted image and put an alias to the folder back in the user's
Documents folder. Everything works as it should, *and* performance is
much better as well.

Not only that, but because I'm using the new sparse bundle format, the
actual disk image "file" that needs to be backed up in order to backup
the user's email is in reality a directory containing many separate
8MB "band" files. So instead of a large database file that needs to be
backed up in its entirety every night, the server only needs to back
up the individual bands that have changed. Given that some of the
users I support have Database files in the 2 - 4 GB range, this is
going to save us a lot.

So:

Better backups.

Better performance.

Fixes Microsoft's failure.

And my users are happy.

Further info:

Add the mounted disk image to the Spotlight Privacy tab in System
Preferences. If you don't, you'll occasionally get messages that the
database is corrupt.