Hosted Microsoft Exchange E-Mail on Office 365
By Richard Hay for Windows Observer
I recently transitioned our household to hosted email accounts with Office 365. My wife and I are both Outlook users and like the benefits of working in that interface locally on our desktop and laptops.
The challenge in the past was how to effectively work on two different platforms and keep everything in sync between the two systems. Over the years we have tried a couple of different things with varying results.
You see one of the limitations with Outlook and the PST file format it uses to store your data is that storing them on a network drive is unsupported and is known to cause file integrity issues. PST files were created so users could store copies of their emails from the Exchange Server on a local machine or in the case of POP3 users have that file as their main message store for downloaded email.
According to the Limits to using personal folders (.pst) files over LAN and WAN links knowledge base entry there are three key areas that make this configuration unsupported:
*All operations take longer.
*Write operations can take approximately four times longer than read operations.
*Outlook has slower performance than the Exchange Client.
So as you can see storing a PST file on a shared or networked drive is not an ideal solution although it can work. This does however become an issue if we are travelling and need to access the accounts PST files on the Windows Home Server we have back at home.
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This post is excerpted with permission from Windows Observer.
