Cached Excange Mode

[WJason]

I have a user working at a remote site with a laptop. He is logged into our
domain and is running Outlook 2003. The exchange server is here -- about
1000 miles away. The network connection isn't great so Outlook frequently
goes into "Trying to connect" mode and then back to "Connected". He was
experiencing email delays of 4 to 6 hours. When emails did finally download,
the "Send/Receive" was taking several minutes. I disabled Cached Mode and
now he's getting emails as soon as they're sent (from within the domain) and
they download in seconds. It's probably not ideal to run with cache mode
disabled; but what's causing the delays? Can I tweak cached mode to run more
efficiently?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

The difference is that without Cached Exchange Mode, you are directly
looking at the Exchange database. Without it, you are looking at a cache.

As long as there is a connection available you'd of course directly see the
new items as they arrive into Exchange without CEM enabled.

When CEM is enabled and a message arrives, Exchange will give Outlook a
notification of it and Outlook will download it 30 seconds after receiving
this notification. If within those 30 seconds other new messages arrives as
well, these messages will be downloaded too. If you lose the connection to
Exchange within these 30 seconds, the timer will be reset.

Also note that when you need to receive a large email and the connection is
very bad, the send/receive progress might fail which will result in Outlook
needing to make another attempt to download the entire message again.