We have spent a lot of time recently (which translates to a lot of extra expense for our customers) troubleshooting, managing, and working with VERY large mailboxes.

From a purely technical standpoint, once a mailbox gets over a GB in size, it starts to become a minor challenge in terms of supporting it, speed of access and search, and management in general. Once a mailbox gets to be over 2 GB in size, we start to run into some very serious limitations that will manifest in support, management, and disaster recovery scenarios.

Believe us when we say we are VERY heavy Outlook users, but using a few simple techniques, it is not much of a challenge at all to keep our own mailboxes under the 1 GB limit we need to keep us ‘light on our feet' with our own mailboxes.

First: archive! Outlook has a built in archive feature that will remove things from your mailbox and put them into a long term storage file. Our technique is to add to that archive file daily until it gets to be between 1 and 2 GB in size, then burn that to a DVD (so that it isn't taking up space on the server). This can easily be set up to happen automatically in Outlook, and you can get very granular in your control of what gets archived, how old it has to be before archive, etc. Just ask us for help to get this set up.
 

Ever heard a small-business owner say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"? This simple old saying depicts the mentality of thousands of SMBs when it comes to preventing security breaches and assessing vulnerabilities within their networks.

If the servers are running, e-mails are accessible and customers aren't complaining about identity theft -- companies logically assume that their security measures, however informal, are working. This false sense of security is exactly what hackers and identity thieves prey on.

The truth of the matter is that networks of all sizes are vulnerable to attacks and security threats 24/7/365. Spyware, worms and viruses don't discriminate. If there is a way into your network, they will find it and you may, or may not, know about it. Although the short-term impact to your business is obvious, the long-term impact is what really keeps us up at night.

Security breaches and other malicious attacks not only take down the network and compromise your company's data and your customers' privacy, they can ruin your company's reputation. With competition around every corner, and new laws mandating the disclosure of data theft to affected consumers, news like this travels fast. So what should you do?

Depending on the level of IT support you have on hand, you may try to safeguard your network by deploying highly publicized software upgrades and security patches.
 

by Jane Cage, COO, HTS

We live in a world that constantly forces us to "do more with less". Employees are expected to be more efficient. Multi-function devices are becoming the standard on many desktops. We multi-task by answering email, talking on the phone and reviewing a spreadsheet – all at the same time.

We shouldn't be surprised then that IT departments are asking the same of their fileservers. When server utilization gets measured, we find that many servers have much more capacity than they actually use for the majority of the time. With so much excess capacity – why not run more than one server on a single machine?