Managing My E-mail

by Michael B. Smith, Consultant and Exchange MVP, The Essential Exchange

It’s often said that the first step to resolving a problem is admitting that there is a problem. So…I admit it. I’m an e-mail packrat. I have e-mail in PSTs going back over a decade covering four different companies.

What’s the value of that, you ask? Well, most of the time, all this information does is consume disk space. However, from time to time, I come up with those rare gems that make it all worthwhile. Consider the eight-year-old e-mail from my ex-wife which proved… anyway. Of more significant business value is the history I have maintained with companies over the last decade and the institutional knowledge that is preserved with those various e-mail documents. I also use this resource for networking with other information professionals and building better business relationships. Overall, it’s invaluable to me.

However, this comes at a cost – I literally have to manage my e-mail. Otherwise, the pure size and number of documents in my personal e-mail archive would be overwhelming. Over the years I have developed some techniques:

1. I separate e-mail into four large categories (and thus folders in my mailbox): Personal, Companies, People, and Mailing Lists. The last category may seem a little odd, but I’m very active in a number of e-mail based mailing lists – I archive the contents of those that I think are interesting and that I believe I may one day have a use for.

2. Within each of the large categories, I create a subfolder for each individual item. That is, for People for example, I create a subfolder for each person that I correspond with. I specifically use “last-name, first-name” for filing, but that’s just for consistency sake. For each company, I create a subfolder named for that company.

3. At the beginning of each year, I create another subfolder within each individual item for the prior year and move the prior year’s emails into that subfolder. Note that I started doing this back when Outlook got really slow when there were more than about a thousand items in a folder. With Outlook 2007 and above, this is really not an issue any longer.

4. Items that need action get marked for follow-up. They stay in my Inbox until they are complete. If I need to do something not based on an e-mail, I send myself an e-mail so that my ToDo list is all in one place. Note that some people really like the Tasks capability of Outlook and if that works for you – I say go for it. Each person will need to figure out what is best for them. When projects grow large, I leave a tickler e-mail in Outlook and create a project plan using Microsoft Project.

5. Finally, I index EVERYTHING. All of this information is of no value if it can’t be found. Windows Search 4.0 is great tool – now. Before it was around, I used third party add-ins such as Xobni and LookOut to be able to access and search my piles of data.

Now, as an individual consultant, this all works great. With Outlook in cached mode, all of my mailbox data is also on my laptop and I can search, index, find, report, etc. etc. However, for a company with more than one person, this solution really doesn’t scale. You need tools that can hold a corporate archive and do many-mailbox searches and reports, not just for business intelligence but also for compliance and legal reasons. Exchange Server 2010, which has gone to the RTM milestone today, has some of those capabilities. However, for a fully featured and robust solution, you should investigate solutions outside of Microsoft itself.

Archiving Best Practices?

And administrator recently asked about best practices for archiving older email. "Do you encourage employees to archive on a yearly, quarterly or some other time frame basis, or is it based upon volume of messages? Also, for notebook users, do you put the archived folders on their laptops and make a copy to a server for backup/retention purposes?"

First you need a policy for compliance or discovery and it should be all or nothing- either keep all of the old mail or delete all of it. You may, of course, need to archive mail as required law, but for everything not covered by law, it’s a business decision. You need to decide what needs kept and for how long then you need to stick to the policy.

You need a proper archiving solution on the server, not a hodgepodge of PST's floating around the network. Exchange 2007 and 2010 offer managed folders and there are many third party archiving solutions available.

If you decide not to archive, create a Mailbox manager policy to delete older messages from the user's mailboxes. This policy can also empty the Junk mail and Deleted items folders.

Discuss it: http://forums.slipstick.com/showthread.php?t=24819 

Booking more than 180 days out

The question of the week this week involved resource calendars not allowing meeting requests more than 180 days out.

"How can I set up the resource calendar to accept my meeting request scheduled more than 180 days out? Currently, the meeting request fails with this message:

Your meeting request was declined.
This resource can only be scheduled up to 180 days in advance. The end time should fall before <date>."

The administrator needs to use the exchange management shell to change this.

The command is
set-mailboxcalendarsettings "MailboxAlias" -BookingWindowInDays <# of days>

Example:
set-mailboxcalendarsettings "Meeting Room 1" -BookingWindowInDays 365

If you do a
Get-MailboxCalendarSettings <mailbox alias> |fl

You will see a long list of the properties and their values that are associated with the resource mailbox.

Outlook Quick Tip: Save as… MSG

Outlook 2007 uses the HTML formal as the default for saving email messages. Is there a way to change this behavior to the Outlook message "MSG" format instead of HTML.

No. But you can open the save location in Windows Explorer and drag the messages to it.

Bonus tip: if you select several items and use Save as, they are saved together in one txt file.

New ways to try-and-buy Office 2010

Microsoft is offering new ways to try and buy Office, and a new "lite" version that will replace Works on new computers.

Microsoft is replacing Works with a cut down version of Office called Office Starter 2010. Office Starter 2010 is a reduced-functionality, advertising-supported version of Office 2010, available only on new PCs. Office Starter 2010 will include Office Word Starter 2010 and Office Excel Starter 2010, with the basic functionality for creating, viewing and editing documents. Office Starter 2010 gives users a simple path to upgrade to a full version of Office 2010 directly from within the product.

Users who buy a new PC with Office preinstalled will be able to purchase a Product Key Card containing a single license card (no DVD media) from major electronic retail outlets. The key number contained on the card will unlock Office 2010 software pre-loaded by the PC manufacturers and enables any one of three full versions of Microsoft Office – Office Home & Student 2010, Office Home & Business 2010, or Office Professional 2010.

For those users who want to try (or buy) Office 2010 on their current computer, they can download the Click-to-Run offering. Click-to-Run reduces the time and effort required to download Office 2010 and automatically downloads and installs any software patches when connected to the Internet. Click-to-Run uses virtualization technology, allowing users to maintain multiple versions of Office so they can try Office 2010 side-by-side with their existing version of Office.