Whilst recently migrating users to the new Exchange mail servers, a trend has become very apparent amongst our user community.

Background:
The mailbox move process creates a new mailbox on the new server then proceeds to copy every message individually before closing the connection and transferring which mailbox the user account points to. It’s a tedious, long-winded process, but unfortunately that is what we have to work with.

During this process the GUI/Powershell gives an indication of progress and which Outlook folder that is currently being processed. It is difficult not to notice the process trundling along and very difficult not to notice the prevalence of users with massive Deleted Items folders.

The above example is actually pretty tame. Some users have Deleted Items folders with excess of 8000 items.

EDIT

Here is an example of 8000+:

My main questions are:

• Are users aware that their Deleted Items folders are so large and takes up part of their quota?
• Are users aware that they can easily empty it or even automate the process? 2003, 2007
• Do users use e-mail in a way that necessitates having this massive log of deleted items; is it an urge to have an empty inbox, but refer to the deleted items frequently?

Of course, the reason for this blog post is purely selfish, as the mailbox moves take much longer and the mailbox databases grow much larger, however it does emphasise that folk may use e-mail in a plethora of differing ways.

This post is also a chance to refer to the post I made last year which talks about the inbuilt ‘Recover Deleted Items’ functionality of Exchange.

IMAPs (Secure IMAP) access to the Exchange 2007 servers is now available, however it will only be implemented on a per user basis on the authority of a School Computing Officer and should only be used by non-Windows users.

It’s use will remain unsupported due to the nature of not being able to control which clients access the servers and not being able to provide adequate support for unknown clients. The transfer of existing mail will also remain the responsibility of the user. Any client queries should first be directed to your School Computing Officer.

The introduction of this service is to offer non-Windows users the opportunity to use their preferred mail client against Exchange and subsequently not have the separation of Mail and Collaboration/Calendaring functionality.

Access is limited to IMAPS on port 993

If you would like to make use of IMAP access to Exchange, please ask your School Computing Officer to request access for you through the ISS helpdesk.

Further information and examples of client configuration can be found here

An area that Microsoft have massively improved upon is their documentation for the Office suite. Office Online and the online version of the help within the Office 2007 applications is very impressive these days.

Sometimes it feels like reinventing the wheel for us to produce some forms of documentation as Microsoft have already produced demos, training and how-to documents to a high standard. It is surprising that it is not first port of call for needing to know how to do something within Office, perhaps it is because the Paperclip man (Office Assistant) from old versions of Office was so annoying.

I would in particular recommend the Outlook documentation at Office Online here.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/default.aspx

There are a few different choices when wishing to publish your Exchange calendar to the internet. Some offer frequent and automatic updates, others require manual intervention each time you make a change. Publishing your calendar to internet can be useful when you want to share with someone who doesn’t have a University Exchange mailbox.

1. Publishing to Office Online

Office Online is Microsoft’s free service that allows Microsoft Live users to view and publish calendars to their website. The main pre-requisites are that both publisher and viewer need to have a Live account. Calendars are updated automatically every 20 minutes or so.

You can sign up for live accounts here. You have the option to create a new e-mail account that will provide you with hotmail, or have your @ncl.ac.uk e-mail address become your Live user ID. I’d probably recommend the @ncl.ac.uk route, but it depends what you are after.

The documentation on Office Online on how to publish calendars is very good and thorough, so rather than reinventing the wheel, here is the: Microsoft document.

2. Publish to a WebDAV Server

If you have access to a server that has WebDAV enabled you can publish the calendar information there without needing to have access to a Microsoft Live Account. Unfortunately, it is slightly more difficult to prohibit access. This would be acheived using file sharing permissions. Calendars are updated automatically every 20 minutes or so.

The Office Onlike document detailing publishing to a WebDAV server is here.

3. Save your Calendar as a Web-page

If you select your calendar and then select File – Save As Web Page you can generate files that you can publish on a web server. You have to manually re-save the calendar and re-publish the files every time you make a change to your calendar.

A new document detailing Exchange’s ‘Recover Deleted Items’ functionality can be found here.

We are doubling the Deleted Items retention to 14 days on Exchange 2007. Instructions on using the feature are present for Outlook and OWA 2003/2007.