Hello Microsoft community. We are an IT consulting firm working on behalf of a client with an interesting problem. Here is the scenario:
- Users in question are on a Server 2008 R2 terminal server with Office 2010 running with Cached Exchange Mode OFF.
- User A is delegating User B's mailbox.
- User A frequently exports User B's contacts to an Excel file for record-keeping purposes.
- Ever since fork-lifting their Exchange server from an on-premise Server 2003 server to a Server 2008 R2 server off-premise, exporting contacts to Excel is PAINFULLY slow. A list of 1,000 contacts can take about 45 minutes to export to Excel.
We have tried exporting to other formats (CSV / Tab-delimited) but the same issue occurs. If, however, you export to a .PST file, it goes through in a matter of seconds. If a different user in the company working on a traditional workstation with Cached Exchange Mode ON performs the same Export to Excel routine, it goes through in about 15-20 seconds. This can be reproduced in both Office 2007 and Office 2010, both again with Cached Exchange Mode turned ON but Download Shared Mailboxes is turned OFF.
The problem is that because User A is delegating User B, turning on Cached Exchange Mode & Download Shared Mailboxes would bloat the size of User A's the .OST file and thus take up a lot of space on the terminal server. Not to mention that when an .OST file gets up to a certain size, it can cause some really odd issues with Outlook. User A actually has several (approximately 8) other users that they delegate so if we choose the Cached Mode / Download Shared option, the .OST can potentially bloat to 50+ GB.
We can reproduce this problem in our own environment and in other clients we manage where they have en Exchange server off-site and are running Outlook without Cached Exchange Mode. This almost seems to be a bug in how Outlook exports the file if the mailbox is not in Cached Exchange Mode and the server is not on-premise.
We've been banging our head against a wall on this. Right now, the user is just allowing more time to export the contacts to Excel but what users to take seconds can take almost an hour.
Thank you.