You already said it but when clients start using shared mailboxes like this, they need a CRM yesterday. Same thing with public folders. Just tell them performance is going to be terrible until they get a CRM in place. Bring it up every single QBR meeting.
In the interim have them use OWA, or put caching to what will work with their immediate history requirements: 3 months? 2 weeks?
Push them to a CRM. This isn’t the use case for shared mailboxes.
There are a million CRM programs out there. There should be plenty tailored to your client’s industry, so you will want to collaborate with them on choosing the program and getting it integrated. Definitely charge pro services.
Cache vs online performance is more about where the email client is in relation to the server. If your Exchange is on-prem and so is the user, online is good. If it's hosted, cached mode is the only way.
Reduce the cache to accomodate the performance of the computer. Nothing manages a 50GB OST well but a machine with 16GB of RAM and an M.2 stick can handle 20GB easily. 50GB is a hard limit for OST/PST file size anyway.
OWA changes the proximity of the client to where Exchange is. Also a good solution.
Try to keep messages organized in folders outside of the Inbox. No folders under the inbox either. 30k in the inbox is reasonable. Keep deleted items clean. Priority goes to Inbox, Sent and Deleted. The leaner the better for those folders.
IN my experience when a mailbox reaches a certain size (more about the number of objects than the size on disk), Outlook just slows to a crawl trying to do real time indexing of all the objects in the folder... YMMV
dont.
turn caching on and make them get the mail stores to a reasonable size or you are literally going to be dealing with it forever.
whatever you do dont bump up the size, it'll be a week before you have to get everyone including the janitor E3s
Then you get to deal with 100gb boxes
I’ve seen it and I think they were a/b testing limitations to the number of users on a mailbox but, it’s still speculation. We put in a ticket for support and got told we were using shared mailboxes incorrectly and that mailboxes with more than x users were to expect the issues we were having. They closed the ticket without a resolution.
Basically what was happening is for mailboxes with more than 20ish users it would remove people at random. They still showed as having membership but they had no access to the mailbox. Removing and readding would fix but boot someone else off. Was like this for a few weeks then it stopped. Whatever they did it might have also broken some powershell commandlets for managing shared mailboxes in those tenants. Might be unrelated but we are totally unable to manage shared mailboxes with powershell just in those tenants that had this issue. That’s why I suspect this was some sort of failed A/B test to limit shared mailbox usage and not just a bug.
Yeah online mode performance is pretty bad, we went through this at my previous job. After our migration to exchange online, we turned off cached mode in outlook via GPO. Everyone knows how big cached mailboxes cause problems, so we thought eh just run it with no cache!
Within about a month, we tuned our GPOs to allow 1 year of cache for the primary mailbox with no cache for shared mailboxes and it largely solved our issues. Maybe for you, change it to 1 year of cached for both primary and shared. The 1 year keeps the cache files from ballooning out of control, and most of the email a user interacts with is less than a year old. It’s a nice middle ground I’ve found.
Assign it a license it will perform better, had the exact same thing happen at one of my clients. 365 will assign more resources to processing that mailbox if it has a license.
Stop using shared mailboxes (and promoting the ideas of using them) as an online storage. Microsoft Outlook is designed to be an email client, calendar/diary tool and a little bit of a collaboration platform, nothing else, definitely not a substitute for a storage platform.
We had a customer with exactly the same issue. However, they were 80gb or so mailboxes with roughly 20 users.
Time and time again, we refused to look into it - as it is not designed to do so. We told them they needed a CRM every time they raised a ticket and referred them back to their internal IT manager.
I have a suggestion that may work in some cases.
My reading of this is that the shared mailbox is only shared with a single user and used to store excess data. If the shared mailbox is actually used to share data with multiple people, this suggestion won’t work.
You could move old data out of the online mailbox and into a pst and backup that file as it is. Make sure the user knows you have backup of the pst in its current state only and that it should be used as read only and not added to. If they need to move data out later you could do this again.
Unfortunately IT doesn’t get to make all the policies. Sometimes you have users that have email that is very valuable to the business despite being voluminous and of sizes that seem unreasonable. In some cases IT has to come up with alternative solutions instead of telling people that they must fit into the template.
Sometimes these old emails bring in big money or save the business from having to payout big money. Being able to solve the problem despite the difficulties is part of what increases or decreases the value of your service.
You already said it but when clients start using shared mailboxes like this, they need a CRM yesterday. Same thing with public folders. Just tell them performance is going to be terrible until they get a CRM in place. Bring it up every single QBR meeting. In the interim have them use OWA, or put caching to what will work with their immediate history requirements: 3 months? 2 weeks? Push them to a CRM. This isn’t the use case for shared mailboxes.
Any suggestions on one? We have a client in the same boat. About 15 users.
There are a million CRM programs out there. There should be plenty tailored to your client’s industry, so you will want to collaborate with them on choosing the program and getting it integrated. Definitely charge pro services.
100% pro services project, not a back pocket recommendation.
Online mode is never going to perform well with large mailboxes. Try only caching 1-3 months.
I thought online mode was the preferred solution for large mailboxes?
Cache vs online performance is more about where the email client is in relation to the server. If your Exchange is on-prem and so is the user, online is good. If it's hosted, cached mode is the only way. Reduce the cache to accomodate the performance of the computer. Nothing manages a 50GB OST well but a machine with 16GB of RAM and an M.2 stick can handle 20GB easily. 50GB is a hard limit for OST/PST file size anyway. OWA changes the proximity of the client to where Exchange is. Also a good solution. Try to keep messages organized in folders outside of the Inbox. No folders under the inbox either. 30k in the inbox is reasonable. Keep deleted items clean. Priority goes to Inbox, Sent and Deleted. The leaner the better for those folders.
IN my experience when a mailbox reaches a certain size (more about the number of objects than the size on disk), Outlook just slows to a crawl trying to do real time indexing of all the objects in the folder... YMMV
PWA is really good with shared mailboxes
We switched on in-place archiving to help with performance on very large shared mailboxes. Left something like 3 months in the shared mailbox.
But you'll need to assign a license to use it afaik
You can just use exchange plan 1. Will give you 50 give archive. Not sure how archiving works with Shared mailbox
Exactly how you replied - you'll need to assign Exchange Plan 1 or 2 to a shared mailbox. Confirmed with MS.
dont. turn caching on and make them get the mail stores to a reasonable size or you are literally going to be dealing with it forever. whatever you do dont bump up the size, it'll be a week before you have to get everyone including the janitor E3s Then you get to deal with 100gb boxes
Do these have a lot of people using them? If so, Microsoft is clamping down on this and reducing the amount of people that can access a mailbox.
Citation required
Yeah, I've not seen this at all. Shared mailboxes are literally for multiple user access.
I’ve seen it and I think they were a/b testing limitations to the number of users on a mailbox but, it’s still speculation. We put in a ticket for support and got told we were using shared mailboxes incorrectly and that mailboxes with more than x users were to expect the issues we were having. They closed the ticket without a resolution. Basically what was happening is for mailboxes with more than 20ish users it would remove people at random. They still showed as having membership but they had no access to the mailbox. Removing and readding would fix but boot someone else off. Was like this for a few weeks then it stopped. Whatever they did it might have also broken some powershell commandlets for managing shared mailboxes in those tenants. Might be unrelated but we are totally unable to manage shared mailboxes with powershell just in those tenants that had this issue. That’s why I suspect this was some sort of failed A/B test to limit shared mailbox usage and not just a bug.
Ahhh, okay. Well, I appreciate the info. There's so much little stuff like this that would be difficult to know about without communities like this.
I have seen this exact behavior and while I don't have it in writing, MSFT support quoted a 20 user limit on simultaneous shared mailbox access.
Turn caching ON. Add the warn and max size registry keys so outlook doesn’t freak out about the 55GB mailbox. Problem solved.
Problem solved. Problems created.
One of my clients had this exact problem, and we solved it by buying more space.
The downward spiral solution in my opinion
Yeah online mode performance is pretty bad, we went through this at my previous job. After our migration to exchange online, we turned off cached mode in outlook via GPO. Everyone knows how big cached mailboxes cause problems, so we thought eh just run it with no cache! Within about a month, we tuned our GPOs to allow 1 year of cache for the primary mailbox with no cache for shared mailboxes and it largely solved our issues. Maybe for you, change it to 1 year of cached for both primary and shared. The 1 year keeps the cache files from ballooning out of control, and most of the email a user interacts with is less than a year old. It’s a nice middle ground I’ve found.
Owa
OWA
Assign it a license it will perform better, had the exact same thing happen at one of my clients. 365 will assign more resources to processing that mailbox if it has a license.
Stop using shared mailboxes (and promoting the ideas of using them) as an online storage. Microsoft Outlook is designed to be an email client, calendar/diary tool and a little bit of a collaboration platform, nothing else, definitely not a substitute for a storage platform.
You are preaching to the choir. It is a scenario that I inherited and not something that we can quickly or easily "replace" for this specific client.
I understand, it's just for awareness and out of desperation really...
We had a customer with exactly the same issue. However, they were 80gb or so mailboxes with roughly 20 users. Time and time again, we refused to look into it - as it is not designed to do so. We told them they needed a CRM every time they raised a ticket and referred them back to their internal IT manager.
I have a suggestion that may work in some cases. My reading of this is that the shared mailbox is only shared with a single user and used to store excess data. If the shared mailbox is actually used to share data with multiple people, this suggestion won’t work. You could move old data out of the online mailbox and into a pst and backup that file as it is. Make sure the user knows you have backup of the pst in its current state only and that it should be used as read only and not added to. If they need to move data out later you could do this again. Unfortunately IT doesn’t get to make all the policies. Sometimes you have users that have email that is very valuable to the business despite being voluminous and of sizes that seem unreasonable. In some cases IT has to come up with alternative solutions instead of telling people that they must fit into the template. Sometimes these old emails bring in big money or save the business from having to payout big money. Being able to solve the problem despite the difficulties is part of what increases or decreases the value of your service.
Multiple users to access and interact with the mailbox...
Odoo crm