The Outlook Expert

February 2009 Volume 3, Number 1

In This Issue

· Improving Outlook and Exchange Performance

· Outlook and Exchange Performance Links

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TeamScope CRM for Outlook
Allows your team to manage contacts, communications, sales opportunities and schedules completely within Outlook.

TeamWork Workflow
Centrally manage your team's workflow using your existing Microsoft Outlook/Exchange environment.

DataLink for Outlook
Transfer and synchronize data between Microsoft Outlook and databases.

Updater for Outlook
Perform mass updates on your Outlook data without programming.

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Contacts Scrubber for Outlook
Eliminate duplicate records from your
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Linker for Windows
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Additional downloads:

TeamScope CRM Quick Start Guide

TeamScope CRM Multi-user Installation Guide

Reference Guide Help File

TeamScope CRM Case Studies

How a Major Financial Services Company Met Its CRM Needs for Over 3000 Users with TeamScope CRM

How The Kelsey Group replaced an expensive and hard-to-use CRM system with TeamScope CRM

How Needham & Co is supporting their Investment Banking business using TeamScope CRM

Pollution Risk Services: Integrated Contact Management for Microsoft Outlook

TeamWork Case Study

Arista Tubes: Improving the product development process through Outlook-integrated workflow

TeamScope™ Partners

SWDittmar,LLC

Improving Outlook and Exchange Performance

Is Outlook getting slower and slower? Are you getting frustrated waiting for Outlook to respond? We hear this from many of our customers, so we thought it worthwhile to ask Frank Cabreja of IT Edge, one of TeamScope’s premier partners, about this important topic.

We hear many stories from our customers about how Outlook’s performance changes and how frustrating it is. Sometimes Outlook’s performance changes when the user moves to a new computer, or starts working remotely, or just slows down over time for no obvious reason. Fortunately there are things that can be done to improve Outlook’s performance.

· Cached Exchange Mode
In order to improve Outlook’s performance when using an Exchange server, Microsoft introduced Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook 2002. Prior to this release, users were only able to work either “connected” or “off-line”, and when working “off-line” would have to periodically request downloading e-mail and Public Folder items. By turning on Cached Exchange Mode users now have a third option, allowing them to work “connected” so that Outlook automatically downloads new e-mails and changes to Public Folders, but use a local copy of these items when reading the items and making updates. While a user on a properly configured high-speed network would not notice much difference when using Cached Exchange Mode, users working remotely or on an overloaded or incorrectly configured LAN will notice a great improvement in performance. In particular, users of Exchange Public Folders, which are used by TeamScope CRM to store e-mails, phone logs, and other contact information so this information can be accessed from within Outlook by everyone in the organization, will notice a big improvement in Outlook’s responsiveness if they enable Cached Exchange Mode for Public Folders.

· Defragmenting
Most of our customers use Microsoft’s Exchange server in conjunction with Outlook. In addition to providing a centralized server for managing corporate e-mails, the Exchange server provides Public Folders that can be accessed by everyone within the organization. Over time the data stored on the Exchange server will grow, but the Exchange server does not store it in the most efficient manner, so it will begin to slow down. Fortunately there are tools available to improve the Exchange server’s performance through defragmentation of the data stored on the server. Additionally, defragmenting of the user’s hard drives can have a big impact on Outlook’s performance, especially when using Cached Exchange Mode, an Outlook Personal Store (PST) or working offline.

· Hard Drives
One of the more puzzling discoveries was that the type of hard drive you use with Outlook can have a major impact on performance! In recent years solid state hard drives and hybrid drives which combine solid state flash memory with conventional magnetic disc drives have come on the market. These drives have great technical specifications for general use, but it turns out they are poor performers when used with Outlook due to the way that Outlook stores information on the local hard drive. In addition, the rotational speed of a hard drive can make a big difference, so we recommend hard drives with at least a 7200 RPM speed for both laptops and desktop systems.

· Large Data Stores and Outlook 2007
With Outlook 2007 Microsoft introduced a new data structure for PST (the files used for Personal Stores) and OST (the Offline Store files used when working offline and with Cached Exchange Mode). Due to this new data structure the number of writes to the hard drive increases as the file size approaches 2GB and are more pronounced when the size reaches 4GB. Fortunately Microsoft has released an update that resolves this issue and if users are up to date with their patches they may not experience this, but it is good to keep in mind.

In addition to these areas there are configuration issues that may impact Exchange server performance that are more technically complex which we will cover in a later Outlook Expert.

Frank Cabreja
Senior Network Engineer and CRM Product Manager
mailto:frank@itedge.com
(610)431-7500 x229

Useful Outlook and Exchange Performance Links

Hard Drive Performance

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-drives,3.html

Pay particular attention to:

Database I/O Benchmark Pattern
Average Read Transfer Performance

Large Data Stores and Outlook 2007

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=932086
The fix to this issue is described here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933493/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923893

This article describes the Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003

http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/ol2007/slow.htm

Why is Outlook 2007 so slooooooow?

http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/ol2007/contactsearch.htm

Not really a performance issue, but the fact that the new Instant Search requires the user to rebuild the index periodically is important.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325044

Virtual memory fragmentation can lead to poor performance and “unexpected behavior” (like losing e-mails?)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905184

Desktop search utilities can cause your Exchange server to take a big performance hit!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289120

If Outlook users open too many e-mails at once, Exchange can slow down and become unstable.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949295

When connecting Outlook 2007 to Exchange 2003 having too many shared calendars causes an Exchange performance issue.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919207

Rapid increases in the database for Exchange 2000 and 2003 can degrade performance.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328880

The attack of the Zombie Users! Apparently on Exchange 2000, Public Folder ACL performance is reduced when an Exchange user is not in the Active Directory.

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