remote access to outlook problem – help please
I support a few uses who remote into their outlook.
One of the uses has a large archive folder that can be veiwed on his laptop while in the office. However when he remotes into his outlook from home on the same laptop he cannot veiw his archive folders.
We are using outlook 2003 on a 2003 small business server.
Thanks for your help.
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ASKED:
July 30, 2006 12:23 PM
UPDATED:
February 5, 2009 8:37 PM
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Answer Wiki:
Hi,
Archive folders often live as a physical file on a network share on the server and NOT in the mail file on the laptop.
Check the properties of the Archive folder in Outlook and see where the data lives. Then you might be able to set it up to synchronise or copy it to the laptop. Remember that if you copy it to the laptop and the laptop dies or is stolen, no more Archive file.. so best to keep it on the server, just synchronise the file.
Ursulus
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As the first reply mentions the default location for user created archives is the local hard drive – unless admins modified default locations first.
So is this archive important to the business? What happens if the desktop hard drive dies? These file based archives get fragile as they get bigger and can be hard to recover, expecially if corruption goes unnoticed for a while. Also the whole archive loads when Outlook opens which can make startup slow on older machines.
If you like the archives on the end user desktop, then your solution is to setup Remote Desktop access from his home machine to his work machine. There are security issues here. A RDP-aware malware on his home machine could remotely do bad things to his desktop, even jump on to the workplace network in the worst case. Proper lockdown might minimize damage system and network level damage. But anything the user can do by remote control is potentially something malware could exercise — user file and email deletion being the most obvious.
Alternatively there are advantages to using rules to create pseudo-archives to another of the folder under the users Exchange account. It stays online, get backed up and has better corruption detection and recovery abilities. Plus you can use Outlook Web Access to view archives from any Internet machine, though I’d avoid heavy email composing unless you have a fast Internet connection. There are various ways of using the regular Outlook client. IMAP is likely the simplest which leaves the email on your Exchange server. (POP3 would move viewed stuff to the home machine which would be bad.)
apologies if I’m repeating advice, can’t b bothered reading thru!
Some of our workers insist on having a local copy of their pst files available. For them, I include a batch file shortcut on their desktops that copies the pst file to a network share for backup purposes whenever they back in the office and they double click on it. It’s based on date frequency.
If u r not comfortable with that ur user needs to be educated in the black arts of “local” and “network”
Good luck.
Mac
Hi
The archive is definitely a physical file, probably on the workstation that the user uses or perhaps within the profile location:
Default:
C:Documents and SettingsUsernameLocal SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftOutlook
The user will not be able to access this or even sync with it unless he connects to the LAN and the folder shared to allow access.
The best way is to COPY the file to the laptop (preferably when the user is in the office seeings it sounds quite a size)
Once you do this the archive can be accessed from both locations. However a word of warning – if either location autoarchives the live mailbox this only adds email to that archive file. The best way is to manually archive to a folder in your live mail (ie transit)(on the server) and copy the archived files to your archive.pst on both machines – then delete the transit folder.
Hope that helps