Guys i want to ask you about your opinions and your solutions for managing the pst file,Actually its became like a night mare to me, i like to know how you all apply it and making sure your clients are satisfied with, and how can you making outlook mail settings roaming with your users without need to help desk i figured out that calling for Outlook mail support gain a huge percent of the all help desk calls, let me hear from you all guys.

I don't quite get what you're on about. On Exchange, we don't have to worry much about PST files; if a user wants to keep more mail than the server allows, they just drag it off to a local PST, which they are required to maintain and back up on their own (we don't back up workstations). We do give them guidelines like keeping the size below 1 GB, but otherwise, it's not a big deal.

Are you not using RPC over HTTP?

No no, all clients are connected via local network or via VPN from home my main problem is that a lot of people get problems with there pst files like loosing it or its corrupted or it have more than one pst and don't know which one should he use, im talking about how you manage your pst files, my second question is roaming outlook, sometimes i notice that even if the user have a roaming profile he need to get his mail configured everytime he log from a new machine, is it just cause there pst file is saved locally ? or there is another configuration to get outlook roaming with the users ?

I think what Illrigger is driving at is if you're not using an Exchange server, why aren't you using an Exchange server?

Exchange would be giving you an .ost file, not a .pst file...and a hell of a lot less problems in regard to account portability.

Lol actually im using Exchange server 2003 for along time now but i still have pst file and also OST is more worse cause its need to authentication so if the user deleted there is no chance to open it anymore.

PST files are the devil.

Before i started where i am, the old Exchange server had something like a 1 gig limit or an over all limit on exchange and the network admin at the time said make pst files... with server 2k3 this was resolved but people still used PST files.

First thing i started doing when i got here was getting rid of them... they just cause problems. Keep everything on your exchange server.

i thought about the same thing as Illrigger suggested but in the end we tell our users never to save anything to the local computer for the same reasons we don't back up workstations and our users are too stupid to do it on their own.

also roaming profiles tend to break if the users are using different OS's or different versions of Office.

What are you talking about? Unless you've got your mailbox retention set to 0 (BAD idea) you can just associate the deleted users' mailbox with another user, or use EXMerge to pull the data out to a PST. It's all about the server with Exchange - you should never need to touch a users' Outlook to manage their mail UNLESS they have a PST.

As for keeping all mail on the server - you obviously either have a big budget for email storage or a small user base.

I have a full TB of RAID10 SAN storage for email, and my 4000 users filled it in 9 months without quotas. Quotas are a necessary evil here, as was passing off the responsibility of keeping any mail in excess of their quota to the end users.

we only have about 400 users and only about 300 of them use email, and we limit mailbox size to 500MB. We have about 200GB on a SAN i am not sure what our RAID is though... i wanna say 5 but im not 100% on that.

but for a company with only 400 users our network was a mess when i got here and the IT department is told what to do by management who has no f'in clue... thats slowly changing though...

we told management last year we NEED a new server room, they said make due... and yesterday the temp in the room hits 30c ... so i start shutting down servers and they are like WTF... well i told you and you didn't listen.

aa the fun of an under appreciated IT department....

Been there, bud, been there.

I pulled a similar stunt regarding security issues (where I'm at now) a few years back. The Exchange server got Open Relayed (turned into somebody's Web Bitch). I simply explained that I'd fix it, right after everyone listened very carefully (this time) to what I was about to say ... They did, and we haven't had any problems since.

Because some times you gota drown the horse.

Lets see:
* We got our cental AV management app after Blaster shut down our entire network for a day - TWICE.
* We got our Exchange server farm and SAN after email went down intermittently for a month due to overstressing the I/0 load.
* We got a new core router after the old one was shut down by our students doing on-campus P2P three times in a week.

We of course warned the paper pushers about all of these things well ahead of time, but they didn't get the message. Right now our main file server's RAID controller is hanging multiple times a month due to overtaxing the I/O load. I made them aware of it three months ago. When the server dies, they'll suddenly "find" my $20,000, I'm sure....

Actually you make me feel better now, cause i thought its happens here only.