Simon Barratt

Weakest Link

We are currently in the pilot phase of our migration to Outlook 2003, but production is not far off now.

We have built out all the Exchange components, and are having great success with Cached mode Outlook, OWA, PDA synch through ActiveSync and the RPC over HTTPs feature.

However, as I suspected, the brunt of our problems all reside in the Microsoft Exchange connector for Lotus Notes.  We are running the latest an greatest version, but it is proving to be very demanding!

For no apparent reason the connector will freeze, not crash, just freeze.  When this happens all email flow between Exchange and Notes stops.  Stopping and starting the service is usually sufficient to get things moving again.  Thanks to GSX Monitor, we have an email routing probe configured to monitor throughput in the connector, allowing us to respond quickly.  This is a big issue, as all inbound Internet email for Notes users has to pass through this connector.

Embedded images are also proving to be challenging.  They are either dropped completely (jpeg or gif) or reduced to a blurry grey scale (bmp) as they pass from Notes to Outlook.  Changing the mail preference in Notes to prefers MIME, addresses some, but not all, of the embedding problems, but unfotunately makes calendar invites that pass through the connector almost useless.  And, as such, is not an acceptable workaround.

Doclinks for the most part work, although we are seeing some stange issues with how the Notes document is opened after double clicking the OLE link to the document.

Lastly, the performance of free/busy searches from Outlook to Notes is bad, and sometimes fail.

We have tickets with Microsoft support, and we wait...