Outlook 2013/2016 using tremendous amounts of bandwidth

Hi,

I've read in many forums about Outlook/Office365 using a tremendous amount of bandwidth. I have an office with 10 heavy outlook users, half being delegates of the bosses that have HUGE mailboxes (~15GB) and that refuse to archive emails.

They have a 30M internet connection that seemingly is not enough and constantly makes their Outlooks "hang" when searching for delegated contacts or just sending and replying to emails with big attachments etc.

I just want to confirm that this is seemingly is the case and that it's nothing else weird. Does it sound right to you guys? I told them to get the max bandwidth they can get there, which is 50MB but they are at the point where they are grumpy and don't believe my advice to upgrade their connection.

Thanks,

K

Kaj said:

Hi,

I've read in many forums about Outlook/Office365 using a tremendous amount of bandwidth. I have an office with 10 heavy outlook users, half being delegates of the bosses that have HUGE mailboxes (~15GB) and that refuse to archive emails.

They have a 30M internet connection that seemingly is not enough and constantly makes their Outlooks "hang" when searching for delegated contacts or just sending and replying to emails with big attachments etc.

I just want to confirm that this is seemingly is the case and that it's nothing else weird. Does it sound right to you guys? I told them to get the max bandwidth they can get there, which is 50MB but they are at the point where they are grumpy and don't believe my advice to upgrade their connection.

Thanks,

K

You're likely dealing with two issues, beyond that of an unreasonable client/employer.

First, as you mentioned, the bandwidth requirement for keeping large mailboxes in sync can be tremendous. If you have a business grade router, you might use it to chart the bandwidth usage when Outlook syncs. Keep in mind that with the amount of network requests back to the MS servers taking place, it isn't just raw bandwidth; latency is also going to be a major killer.... if you only have a small amount of data to keep in sync, than who notices a 50ms latency? But when you have thousands of items in the mailbox that Outlook has to check on, one at a time, suddenly that 50ms latency is a killer. Beefing up your bandwidth rarely improves your latency, unless that bandwidth is already maxed out.

Second, Outlook itself has never been particularly good at managing extremely large mailboxes. The mailboxes are essentially databases, and Outlook is a very poor database engine. (Run scanpst afterhours on those large pst/ost files, and watch it report back the number of items in need of fixing). One of the old methods of improving this was to separate large folders into multiple mailboxes (pst files). However, if they're refusing to archive, they likely want it all "in the cloud"... so they're removing technical solutions to their self-created problems.

If you cannot convince your client / employer to sensibly archive old items, then they need to switch from Outlook to webmail. Webmail will alleviate much of the pain of the large mailbox, as little is transmitted until an attachment needs to be downloaded. Office365's webmail is very full-featured, and can accomplish 95% of what they would do with Outlook.

If webmail isn't good enough, and they're not reasonable enough to archive their mailboxes, then you can always suggest they purchase their own Exchange server. Of course, that's a substantial increase in cost, both for the server and for your time, but it certainly alleviates the bandwidth issue.

So, there you have it... they can:
a) Archive things like sensible people. This solves all the issues, but sounds like it will only happen as a last resort.
b) Use webmail. This solves all the issues, but at the expense of the occasional Outlook feature not available via webmail.
c) Buy an Exchange server. This alleviates the bandwidth and latency issue, but not deal with Outlooks management of overly large mailboxes. Keep in mind that with an Exchange server comes backing it up, etc etc. If you're not full-time IT, also keep in mind that Exchange requires an Active Directory server...

I think that, with a little research and monitoring on your router, you can put together a very compelling case where they will find that the only financially viable solution will be for them to change their ways.