Our small organization has only two users, both on the P1 plan. Both users are using Outlook 2010.
User1 has setup a shared Outlook folder with several levels of sub-folders. This shared folder also contains a shared calendar and shared contact list. The entire shared folder has about 1.3GB of data. This shared folder's contents include lots of historical emails from six years of client communications that include attachments that are mostly pdf's. The shared contacts include all of our business contacts and is accessed daily by both users. The shared calendar is where both users schedule business activities on a daily basis. Essentially, this is our version of Public Folders for the Office365 environment.
Everything works great for User1. All information in the Outlook profile is cached locally, including the shared folder, and the environment is quick and performs well. Nothing to fix here.
User2 can access the shared folder just fine and has no problems accessing emails, attachments, contacts or the calendar that are all within the shared folder, but performance is a big issue.
When we tried to cache all contents of the shared folder for User2, the process would continually have problems and other support threads seem to point to a problem trying to cache large shared folders. We then configured User2 to cache only the shared calendar and contacts, which works well for those items, but access to the shared email folders is unusably slow as Outlook has to download all the content to the profile anytime Outlook is restarted. This can take as much as an hour to get User2 back up and running when opening Outlook, which is unacceptable.
My questions are:
- Would it work better for User2 if a shared mailbox was setup and User1 moved all the contents of the shared folder to the new shared user's mailbox?
- Would both users be able to cache the entire contents of the new shared user's mailbox and avoid any lengthy synchronizations whenever Outlook is restarted?
- Does caching large shared user's mailboxes work where caching large shared folders does not?
Note that we don't want the shared mailbox in order to receive mail or send mail from the shared mailbox, rather we want it as a central place to store historical emails, a shared calender and shared contacts that we both access regularly. The most important issue for us is to be able to cache the large amount of shared data and not get caught up in lengthy sync's that keep us waiting for content to download from the Office365 servers.
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.
PS - We all want our Public Folders back!