Performance is one of the most important characteristics of an application for many of our customers in corporate, small business, and personal environments. Since our application is one that many of you spend a good portion of your day in, the development team here is committed to providing a fast and reliable experience every day when using Outlook. Outlook 2007 is packed with new features, but some of our users are hitting performance issues which negatively impact their day-to-day experience. We are now working even harder for our next release of Office to improve the performance characteristics of Outlook across a number of different features and environments. Microsoft Office’s SP1 update for 2007 has fixed a number of performance issues that some of our users encountered in Outlook 2007. However,
microsoft Office 2010 License, we know that some of you are still encountering issues with performance in Outlook 2007 and we have a set of troubleshooting tips in a separate KB article entitled “How to troubleshoot performance issues in Outlook 2007”, which are designed to help. One of the issues the article describes is how having a large Outlook Data File (.pst or .ost) can affect typical operations like opening, reading, and deleting emails. It defines large as greater than 2.0 GB on disk. I can personally attest to this pain since my .ost file is almost 8.5 GB and growing every day (we send a lot of email here ;-) ). To help improve performance on my Outlook 2007 clients I use Sync Filters. Sync Filters are nothing more than restrictions you can put in Outlook to reduce the amount of data it syncs down from Exchange – thereby reducing the overall size of your .ost file and, potentially, improving performance. Matt Gossage has an excellent post on the Exchange Team Blog that describes how to setup the sync filters (it’s not that hard!) and get your .ost down to a smaller size that benefits Outlook performance in a number of scenarios. After using the tips described in Matt’s post, my local store is 2.5 GB on my desktop machine and only 1 GB on my slower laptop. I hope you find these tips useful, and thanks again to Matt in Exchange for putting together such a great write-up. Michael Affronti
Outlook Program Manager <div