[ms office - 2016] Cached Vs Online

[Davida1992]

Hi all, a few questions, I have been hovering around this forum for years, but I have recently moved into a role in a College and there are some issues with Outlook.

 

Before I start suggesting changes I would love to get some advice on how other people are handling this. Just to give you a rundown though.

 

The college has about 800 members of staff, I would suggest that around 400 - 500 of those login at the college throughout the day. Student machines do not have Outlook installed so are forced to use OWA which works well for them. Our AD is linked to Office 365 and it is all single sign on so there are never really issues for students.

 

Staff however use a mix of Outlook from 2010 to 2016 (mainly 2016 now). It is important to understand that staff use roaming profiles. Also there is a GPO setup in our environment which removes and wipes out any user profiles on local machines when they are started up. There is a script which shuts down all machines at the end of each day so by morning when they are switched on, all profiles will be wiped. So when the users login, their profiles are downloaded again from the server to the local machine.

 

There are a lot of staff using cached exchange, to my understanding the OST sits under the "local" part of the AppData folder. So even when the roaming profile is moved over, the Outlook profile will have to start a fresh when the staff member opens Outlook. This means that if a member of staff has 1GB of email, then when they switch on, login, open Outlook, they have to download that 1GB of email again because it would have been wiped from the local profile on startup and because it is not part of the roaming profile anyway.

 

I hope this makes sense but can anyone verify this?

 

With that in mind, part 2

 

We seem to have issues for staff who use cached, and those that use online. Online tends to be really slow and crashes a lot, particularly for staff that have large mailboxes or a lot of calendars.

Staff using cached find that mailboxes do not update sometimes....

 

I am going to try and push for a lot of staff to start using OWA, would you think based on the functionality of OWA that this would be a viable option for most staff? When staff have issues I tend to direct them to OWA anyway and it always seems to be quick, responsive and it seems to just work!!

 

Thought, comments etc are much appreciated

[Paid_Peanuts]

We found online mode regularly dropped out for us. We now use cached mode for all our staff, the majority of which use outlook. We are solely 2016. We set a GPO to restrict the size of the OST to 3 months worth of mail. This helps the size of the OST.

We don't use roaming profiles, instead use folder redirection for everything - has always worked better for me than roaming profiles.

[Davida1992]

This may be something we should consider, even if we redirect the appdata folder and limit mail to 3 months, it may work better, will see what happens.

 

Thanks

[Chuckster]

I redirect all our users AppData folder to their own user area.

 

But anyway, there is a GPO setting where you can redirect PST and OST files to a specific area. Only our users who remain static and in their offices use Outlook 2016 - everyone else uses OWA.

 

Those within their offices, e.g. SMT, admin, IT, Site, Canteen etc, their OST files are downloaded to C:\Outlook. So even if profiles are removed those OST files will still remain, thus negating the need to freshly download users inboxes each time they launch Outlook.