Large Attachments Freezes Outlook Connector

[chrish01]

Many of the employees here are using the outlook connector and are having gui thread freezing issues. Often, this seems to be caused by the lack of caching by the connector on large attachments. Is the connector single-threaded? Is there a way to fix this?

Its unfortunate cause i know how high of quality scalix is, but the employees are vocally complaining about it.

Cheers

[ScalixSupport]

Hi Christian,

When you say freeze this is just an appearance right? The client does come back and is usable again right? What is happening is the message is being sent in the foreground. We are working on enhancing Connect so many of the foreground transactions will be sent to the background. We are expecting to release this enhancement mid to late Q2.

Be glad your users aren't using Outlook connect over a WAN. Search the forum on the outlook/connect topic for performance and you'll see several posts on this issue.

Best wishes,
Don

[chrish01]

We do in fact have users working over a WAN. Its so bad, they have refused to use scalix connect and have switched to plain IMAP. Unfortunately, this makes calendaring pretty useless for them.

Outlook does come back from the gui threading freeze after the non-threaded call completes.

[chrish01]

Below is a forward from a co-worker which eloquently explains the issue.

==

I actually think there's two issues here:

1) I think that Scalix should do a better job of caching messages w/ attachments when 'working online'. Right now if I switch from a 'small' message to a 'large' one (like one w/ an attachment), I have to wait (outlook pauses) while it downloads the message (w/ attachment) again. It does this even if the message has already been read.

2) In general, operations (sending a large file, switching to a folder w/ a lot of messages, downloading messages w/ attachments, etc.) cause outlook to freeze up. This is totally annoying to the end user.

Couple that w/ the startup time where I can see there's new messages waiting, but must wait for outlook to finish processing reminders before I can click and read them and it makes for an email experience most people will really, really hate.

[kadybee]

Although having just started using Scalix, I've implemented a 'workaround' to this issue.

Having worked IMAP mail over WAN for years I am used to waiting for attachments to display etc. It really isn't different in any client, but most annoying when you go back to that message after the first time or even opening the attachment when not cached.

I simply keep a local PST folder open - where I archive old messages and store various data.

I have created a Message Rule to move any messages with attachments to a LOCAL folder on arrival. This way it is only downloaded once. If I REALLY need it in the server store for web access reference etc., I will drag it back to another folder there.

You'll still have the 'freeze' but at least it's only once.

Perhaps this might be the key to overcome cache/sync issues. This approach is seen in Thunderbird's IMAP where you can stipulate whether folders are stored locally (offline) or not.


Klaus