Hi, i have a main office consisting of 30 users and my main exchange 2007 server acting as hub, edge, client access and mailbox. The organisation has grown from a small base so i may move to a seperate edge server in a dmz if budget allows. I will also sometime soonhave two branch offices consiting of 20 users at each. Should i install an exchange mailbox server at each site also, or since there is a small number of users can i get away with contacting the main exchange mail server at the main office at the expense of WAN traffic. The intersite links are all within the same city so no problem with latency. I will have VPN for each site for active directory administration, and a small server at each (Dual Xeon 1.6GHz, 2GB). I could upgrade the specs and run virtual machines for a domain controller and seperate VM for exchange local mailbox (i have good experience of running production exchange in a virtual machine but thats a different story). I have used exchange 2007 remote access over the internet to a few users at another very small office of 4 users and that worked fine, i am concerened about people pinging large emails about as that will chew up the WAN bandwidth for sure. Would appricate any comments, or design rules for number of users before additional mailboxserversare required? Many thanks in advance

First, there's no way your current server has the Hub, Edge, CAS and mailbox roles on it as the Edge role cannot coexist with any other role. It's more likely that you've installed the anti-spam agents onto the Hub role. Anyway, back to your point. 20 users at an office is an ideal candidate for using Outlook 2007 in cached mode across the links to your central server. Outlook 2007 has much more intelligence when syncing than Outlook 2003 has. You may need to control maximum message sizes if the users do indeed start sending huge attachments.

Hi Neil, I have a question regarding the outlook 2007 for the WAN users. I have 4-sites, Site A has all the servers (Exchange 2007 HUB/CAS/MB), ISASERVER 2006 and DC. All sites have T1-T1 (private lines) connections. The remote sites have w2k8DC, ISASERVER for internet access and no exchange 2007 server. I am still in transitioning mode and my FE-BE exchange 2003 servers are still on-line. I have been testing moving mailboxes and testing the client. My Site-A users outlook 2007 configuration used MAPI and i could see the TCP/IP connection from the Connection Status. When I tried to use the same setup for my WAN users, Outlook 2007 could not connect to the Site-A exchange 2007 server. I have to reconfigure the outlook setup to used the http proxy (outlookw anywhere setup). It works fine and get connected, however when I looked at my ISASERVER, all remotes users has to go through the internet just to get access the exchange 2007. In exchange 2003, my remote users utilized our T1-T1 which is what I want to do the same for Exchange 2007. Please tell me that I am doing the right thing for the remote users. How can my remote users access the exchange 2007 using the LAN configuration? In Exchange 2003 our LAN/WAN users only used the same MAPI setup. Any help is highly appreciated.