The Outook team quietly slipped out a hotfix for Outlook 2007 containing quite a few major performance enhancements.  Dubbed the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update, the KB 961752 patch fixes over 100 individual bugs.

The Outlook team has revised their mailbox/OST size guidelines too, welcome news to anyone using cached Exchange mode.  Before installing the 961752 patch if your OST was larger than about 1GB Outlook's performance would start to suffer.  The new OST guidelines say:

• Up to 5 gigabytes (GB): This size should provide a good user experience on most hardware.
• Between 5 GB and 10 GB: This size is typically hardware dependent. Therefore, if you have a fast hard disk and much RAM, your experience will be better. However, slower hard drives, such as drives that are typically found on portable computers or early generation solid state drives (SSDs), experience some application pauses when the drives respond.
• More than 10 GB: This size is where short pauses begin to occur on most hardware.
• Very large, such as 25 GB or larger: This size increases the frequency of the short pauses, especially while you are downloading new e-mail. Alternatively, you can use Send/Receive groups to manually sync your mail.

Prior to the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update if you had more than 10,000 items in a single folder you'd experience performance issues. After the February update you can usually have around 50,000 items in a folder before experiencing the same issues.

Apparently all cumulative updates for Office are only released as hotfixes, which means it won't be showing up in Windows Update anytime soon (until it's officially released as part of Office/Outlook 2007 SP2).  To download it you need to request a link from Microsoft (it's easy), or you can download the KB961752 patch from Mediafire directly.

Read more about the patch on the Exchange Team's blog or at the descriptively titled "Outlook 2007 improvements in the February 2009 cumulative update" KB 968009 page.

If you're using Outlook with RPC over HTTP(s) (rebranded as Outlook Anywhere with Exchange 2007) one of the most useful tools in your arsenal is the /rpcdiag command line switch which will launch with the Connection Status window.

But what if you don't want to relaunch Outlook? It's surprisingly simple – just hold down the Control key and right-click on the Outlook icon in the system tray.

Normal Outlook Tray Menu

Outlook Tray Menu with extra options

The new options provide you with the Connection Status window, very useful for diagnosing connection and performance issues, and an option to test AutoConfiguration.  If you're having an issue with Exchange 2007 Autodiscover this is very helpful.

Outlook's Exchange Connection Status window

Outlook – Test AutoConfiguration

Here's a somewhat common scenario; you're running Exchange 2003. You'd like to be running Exchange 2007.  Perhaps you'd like a firewall?  Maybe you want Exchange 2007 AND a firewall on the same server.

What to choose, what to choose.  Actually your choices are simple.  Exchange 2003 only runs on 32-bit Server 2003 or Server 2000. If you want Exchange 2007 you need a 64-bit OS.  If you want ISA 2006 you need a 32-bit Server 2003. If you want ISA's successor Forefront TMG your only option is 64-bit Server 2008.  Oh, and Forefront TMG is still in beta.

Best practices aside, it's quite common for smaller organizations to cram as many services onto a single server as possible, and that's a bit more difficult now.

Many of you looking at this are probably asking yourselves "Boy, how did Corey create such a breathtakingly awesome Venn diagram".  Well wonder no more, I make my diagrams in Photoshop bitches.

I've moved almost all of my physical and virtual machines from XP to Vista, mainly because a few things are easier or more pleasant.  WebDAV isn't totally broken in Vista, unlike XP's implementation which doesn't allow you to access authenticated resources properly((XP always sends unauthenticated OPTIONS and PROPFIND requests)).  Driver management and support is better, and I'm ashamed to admit I've grown a little fond of the Aero look.  Granted my video card has more onboard memory than my first 4 computers combined…

Vista has a handy Solutions Center which tracks all crashes that occur and checks with Microsoft for solutions.  I've only had it find two solutions on three different computers, but at least it's trying.

Then I took a look at how may 'problems' (read: crashes) I've had since November 9th, 2008 when I first installed Vista. 105.