E-mail Dilemma--One User, two computers

[ShawnF]

Hello,

We have a user that works on a regular desktop computer on the domain at our main office and uses E-mail on a typical Exchange 2000 setup. He will be getting a laptop computer with Outlook 2000 and a dial-up ISP for the occassional road trip to check E-mail while on the road. I'm not sure how best set up the client or modify Exchange (if even possible) to handle the fact that most Email for the user will be dealt with at our main office.

My canundrum is, if I set up this user with a standard Outlook 2000 Internet E-mail account, every time he takes an occassional road trip (maybe once a month), he'll have to download potentially hundreds of messages onto that laptop since his previous road trip just to get to the current emails actually desired. There isn't a way I know of to specify to download emails received during a certain date range. This user doesn't travel enough to download email to the laptop often enough to make the downloaded amount small and manageable. The client PC Outlook account would be set up to leave a copy of the Email on the server, since we wouldn't want the E-mails to disappear from his inbox on Exchange and be "missing" when he gets back to the main office.

We have Terminal Services, so I could have the user log in to the Terminal Server to check E-mail, but there wouldn't be the ability to read email or type drafts while not online.

I suppose I could have the user log in to Terminal Services and rearrange the Inbox on each road trip, move out all undesired E-mail to another folder, so that only the desired E-mail can then be downloaded by the client Outlook. It appears that E-mail not located directly in the main inbox will not be Downloaded by a client. I don't know if this is the best option.

What can I do either on Exchange, the client, or both?

 

[ACraib]

Why does theu ser need both a desktop and laptop? I'd just replace the desktop with the laptop. Then set the laptop to sync the mailbox everytime Outlook is quit. This will mean the offline ost file will be as close to matching the server copy as possible meaning that when he dials in then only new massages will need to be synced.

Hope this helps.

Andrew

 

[cybersaur]

have the user sync the laptop w/ exchange before he / she hits the road.

 

[PScottC]

With Exchange 2000, Outlook Web Access is automatically installed. You could leverage that in several ways. Allow traffic through your firewall to Port 80 on your mail server, set up a VPN, or have the user dial-up directly into your network. With the last 2 options, he could actually use a regular Outlook client setup for offline access. Using the OWA will keep you from having to configure the laptop for offline access. Opening port 80 can expose you to outside "influences" which you may not want. Another option for OWA would involve getting a secure certificate from RSA or some other security source, and setting it up https:// on your OWA server and opening port 443 on your firewall.

 

[ShawnF]

Thanks for the replies! The user has and needs the two computers becuase the laptop is a "hand-me-down" and is not the fastest/best machine in the world. But it will make due for an occassional road trip. This laptop actually used to be the user's main desktop PC, but it's becoming too old and slow. The user received a new desktop PC (nice and fast). I did not have the budget to get a new laptop for the user instead of a desktop. And as stupid as it sounds, the user doesn't have the desk space for a laptop, seperate keyboard, monitor, mouse, docking station, etc.... So there are several limitations I have to work with and am stuck with.

If did OWA, wouldn't the user also be stuck with only being able to access E-mail while online? If so, then either using OWA or Terminal Services with Outlook are ultimately the same problem.

As for sync-ing before leaving the main office, I thought about that just today. If I were to copy the entire user's Exchange box and transfer it to a *.pst on the laptop initially, that would take care of most of the e-mail, contacts, calender, etc.... for now. Every month or so, the user gets about 300 emails which would still be too much to try and download on the road, so I thought perhaps sync-ing it with Exchange before actually leaving the office would be a good idea.

Short of dialing up to the internet and opening Outlook on the client and sending/receiving, is there a quicker/better way to sync? I'm not familar with setting Outlook up to sync on closing or what an OST file is....