Hello, I appolagize first if this was posted and answered somewhere else on the forums. We're currently running an Exchange 2003 production environment in my company, we've left the "publish free/busy information" to the default 2 months, however we're seeing an increase in the number of complaints about "missing" free/busy info outside the default 2 months. So we're looking to increase the default 2 months, but we're worried about the effects of this on performance. We're also planning to consolidate our exchange environment from 6 servers down to 2 when we upgrade to exchange 2007. Can anyone give me any kind of information regarding what effects increasing the number of months the free/busy information is published to the server will have on performance? Also we don't have any idea how high we'd like to bump this up to, but I think 6 months would be sufficent for our users. I should also mention that we have about 500 users across the 6 servers, but they're not evenly spread out, they range from about 50 up to about 150 users per server. We're running Office 2k3 suite on our workstations, and running outlook in cached mode. Please let me know if you need more information. Thanks, Jacob

Increasing the time frame will just make the public folder that stores free busy info a little bit bigger. I wouldn't worry much about it, unless your Exchange 03 server is currently underperforming. Often 'missing' free/busy info is the symtoms of other issues like public folder replication. Anything funky going on in the app logs or if you run ExBPA?

Thanks, I just didn't know if it would any any real effects on the communcation between the outlook cilents and the server. The current exchange '03 environment is performing just fine, I just wanted to make sure it wasn't going to add too much strain on it. The size of the store isn't too much of a concern for us, unless of course its going to severly bloat the store, but we can probably judge the current store size and estimate the size if we increase the free/busy time by a factor of 3. Thanks again!

Free/Busy information is stored on the Exchange server as a single (special) message for each user in the SCHEDULE+ FREE/BUSY Public Folder. Adding more months to publish will not really increase the storage size by any real measurable amount. It will also not add any issues to the performance of the Exchange Server. The free/busy information is aggregated by the users' Outlook client and stored locally on their mailbox as this special message and then replicated to the Public Folder every so often (this is configurable in the Outlook client). Mark Boeser MSI Systems Integrators http://www.msiinet.com

Thank you!