Large PST issue with Roaming Profiles

[spyordie007]

I'm looking for suggestions for better ways of handing this problem.

I've got some users with obnoxiously large PST files they store old email in. The problem is that we use roaming profiles for these users and as you can guess as these large PST files make the login/out process take a long time.

While there is nothing I can do about the login times when using computers they log into for the first time (since everything has to get pulled down) it's specifically the logout time while using their primary computer that bothers us. The problem is that even if they just add a single email to their PST the whole file has to be copied back up to the profile share when they log out; this (obviously) takes a long time.

We want the PST to remain within their profile so that we have a copy of it (and can back it up). The only viable option I've come up with so far is to move the PST out of their profile and than give them a script that manually copies it into their profile. The idea being that they would have to exit out of outlook, manually run the "PST Backup Script" which would copy their PST into their local my documents and than have a longer wait the next time they log off. I really dont like this idea since it requires user intervention and would take even more of their time when they want to do it (once copying it locally and than again on the way up to the profile share). The other caveot to this approch is that they would not be able to use their PST while on another computer (since the path would be non-existant).

Anyone have any better suggestions for how to handle this situation?

 

[mikecel79]

PST = very very bad, but you probably already knew that

What we do for our users is put the PST files on their home drive. Since everyone has at least a 100MB connection to their home drive accessing the PST file is very fast. If they go to a new computer they know they have to open the PST file from inside Outlook before they can access it. This way it does not get pulled down to their profile and they still have access to it from anywhere.

I've almost gotten upper management to buy into getting an Legato Email Archive. It basically hooks into Exchange and you define a policy on the server (messages older than 90 days), and it moves all those messages off your server into it's own database. To the user it looks exactly the same, but when you access that message it pulls it from the Legato store. Works very well, gives you 2:1 compression, and you keep your single instance storage. We've had too many users corrupt a PST file, or lose one because they decided they needed it on their local drive and the drive crashed, that we are about to ban PST files from the company. It's too fragile of a store, especially as they get large(1GB+).

 

[spyordie007]

Agreed PSTs really suck.

I've got a couple of users who even have 1+GB in Exchange and than another 1+GB worth in PSTs and it just drives me crazy. The reasons I havent just stuck the PSTs on a network share is because:
a. At their home branch they would typically have a 100Mb connection; however we've got 11 branches with varying amounts of bandwidth (a number of them as low as 128k) and users who do a lot of traveling between them. The PSTs would also not be accessable when they are on the road.
b. Storing them on the network would only increase our frequency of corupted PSTs as the network connection is not going to be as reliable as local storage.

I've considered further segmenting of Exchange and than having their data get moved onto the exchange servers; but really dont like the thought of us having to deal with the increased storage used on the servers and the accompanying increased administrative and network overhead required for backup/recovery.

Thanks for the comments.