Common sense tells us that large mailboxes will slow the performance of Exchange Server. But are you aware that item count is the real nemesis of Exchange performance? We recently found this TechNet article, which does an excellent job of explaining the difference between mailbox size and item count — and explains the corresponding impact on Exchange Server performance.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the article that makes a key point about item count:

Understand that most performance issues are not the result of large mailbox size (defined as a mailbox that is larger than 2GB), but instead the number of items in the folder or folders that are being accessed on the server. Having many items in a folder adversely affects performance because operations in those folders will take longer. In particular, performance is largely influenced by the number of items in the critical path folders: Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Item folder.

We urge everyone who is responsible for Exchange Server to carefully read and understand this article. We live in a time where rapid mailbox growth is the norm, and it is critical for the successful management of Exchange that we manage email storage growth with a complete understanding of how Exchange works.

… Bob Spurzem

LiveOffice, a hosted email archiving service, has an interesting trade-off between functionality and user friendliness.

The service is typically used by organizations with 100 to 1,000 employees. So it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that a large organization needs. For example:

• Search is mainly oriented to keywords, and standard email metadata such as TO and FROM addresses and dates. There’s no concept search.
• The granularity of access controls is limited.
• All tags are informally defined on the fly by users.

The lack of these bells and whistles translates to a service that is much more user- and administrator-friendly than it would otherwise be.

…David Ferris

Some countries, such as Belgium, have deployed national identity cards, and many others will follow suit. There was an intriguing discussion on mobile identity at the European e-Identity Conference in The Hague.

Mobile phones are an interesting alternative to conventional cards. Technically, they work well, as they can hold a smart card. There are a number of benefits:

• Most people carry phones with them.
• They can be used for payments, and users prefer phones over cards for this function:
  • New technologies such as Near Field Communications can support “customer-present” payments.
  • SMS authentication can support “customer-not-present” payments.
• Loss of a phone is usually recognized quickly.
• Information on phones can be remotely disabled.

This seems to have worthy potential as a different way to handle identity cards.

… Steve Kille