BBSA and large public folders

[Valerion]

I have recently moved a client to Scalix, and we imported his Public Folders from the previous system. However, we are currently trying to get a BBSA to work to synchronize the Public Folders. I have set up the agreement as follows:

3 offices (A, B and C)

A <-> B

A <-> C

I may later add a B <-> C agreement as well, but I am afraid of creating duplicates if I go that route.

If I load a few items into A, it syncs correctly to B and C, so the agreements are fine.

However, the offices are linked with 128kbs / 256 kbps links (daytime almost completely saturated with other traffic), and the full Public Folder is over 700MB in size. We find that if we start to do a full sync the BB starts to lose sync emails quite frequently.

Is there a relatively easy way we can transfer the bulk of the Public Folders to the other machines, so that the sync doesn't need to happen exclusively over email, but just that changes are synchronized? Ideally A should still be the Master copy of the BB item.

[gren]

Hi Valerion,

Had a bit of a chat in the office here and can't think of a solution involving BBSYNC that wouldn't have some issues I'm afraid. Public folders is one area of the product I'd love to see us make improvements on... Better synchronisation and proxying to the master machines are ideas we have kicked about.

An off the wall suggestion...
You could do without BBSYNC. Instead, periodically do sxmboxexp of the public folders on the master machines and rsync the results with the remote machines and recreate the public folders there - with some extra work to make the items read only perhaps.
The sxmboxexp archives are transaction files, so, it is presumably possible to do this in a more sophisticated way and actually modify the archives on the receiving systems so that messages are not master copies.

I suspect (but don't know for sure) that the network traffic would be substantially less for this.
There are variations on this. You could use notifications or the BB change logs to identify just changed messages and use sxmboxexp for just those.

Regards,
Gren.

[Derek]

So gren, what is the actual problem that Valerion is experiencing? I am currently investigating a multi-server implementation for my company and we are/will be very active with our BB use. We currently have over 4000 public folders. Most of them are empty, but this will change as more users are migrated. Some folders will likely be quite large, like Valerion's.

Is the problem bandwidth, or is BBSYNC just not really up to par? If my company is going to go multi-server, it is critical that public folders are kept in sync. I can always make a case for and get more bandwidth.

Edit: I guess I should clarify that our "multi-server implementation" would be 2 machines connected over a WAN via a 3Mbps pipe, being upgraded soon to 6Mbps.

[gren]

I believe Valerion's issue is bandwidth, though, naturally, only he can vouch for that.

Personally, I would prefer to eliminate synchronisation from the equation and enhance Scalix to redirect to the single BB on whichever server by default. (where this is not appropriate, we shouldn't lose the current capabilities though) However, this isn't any where near the most asked for feature... A similar idea for directories of being able to use an enterprise directory rather than each server having its own directory seems to be more in demand and is likely to happen earlier.

Regards,
Gren.

[Derek]

I see pro's and con's for both implementations--current and what you describe--but I won't get into that here, you don't need my opinion.

I just want to make sure that there isn't any reason why the current implementation can't handle the syncing of a large public folder and a large public folder structure.

It may be moot as I'm almost positive we'll need to use 2 servers, but I'd like to get an idea of how much work I have ahead of me.

Thanks gren.

[Valerion]

I believe my problem is bandwidth-related, yes. Gren's idea makes a lot of sense as well, especially if Public Folders can be included in SmartCache, minimizing network traffic.

[Derek]

Eek. Should public folders become cacheable, I really hope this would be an option. In other words, users could still use the SCM without caching public folders.

Gren's idea makes sense, but bandwidth still becomes a problem. If you don't have the bandwidth to sync, then creating faux public folders that point to the true location won't work well either. Sure, Scalix would be off the hook because there wouldn't be any syncing, but you would have a terrible user experience.

I guess I could make the case for us to buy more Riverbed appliances though.