Good morning, Spiceheads.
I have a few questions for our Exchange gurus out there. Before I get into that, here's my environment...
- Exchange Server 2003 SP2 Standard
- 125 mailboxes
- Mixture of Outlook 2007 & Outlook 2010 (various patch levels for each version)
- Plan to integrate with parent company next fiscal year (Exchange 2013 environment)
When I look in ExMon, I see a myriad of patch levels with my clients. This is partly a design decision of our WSUS server, which does not push any Office updates whatsoever. My predecessor had multiple cases where pushing Office updates broke installations, so since then, we have not offered those updates via WSUS.
What, if any, stability & performance benefits would I see if I upgraded all of my Outlook 2007 folks to Outlook 2010 w/ SP2? Would our current client environment cause performance issues with Exchange 2003? Or, is this not a worthwhile endeavor with parent company integration on the horizon a year later?
The reason I'm even considering the idea of upgrading the clients is two fold. One, the integration date may be pushed out. Two, I am trying to keep Exchange 2003 as healthy as possible until the integration date comes. If by upgrading the clients helps, then I'm willing to take on the endeavor.
Furthermore, while I wait for the appointed integration date, I am in triage mode with the server's database size and overall health. I have been running semi-annual offline defrags to manage the 75 GB database size limit, ISINTEG tests when errors occur and daily full backups to empty out an out of control Transaction log.
Any who, I've gotten overly verbose. I'm going to start a second post for the info store errors/crashes I've been experiencing and cannot explain.
Thanks for your help, guys.
-Josh