Fred Yarbrough said:
Rich,
I see your posts here quite often and I respect your technical opinion.
My post above is due to the following issue.
How would you handle these requirements?
The same way we already do.
For message sizes, place the maximum upper limit at the "global" level
and the smaller limits on the individual objects that are the
exception to those limits. You can only increase the individual
upper-limits to equal the size of the global limit.
For mailbox sizes, place the general limit on the database (and, if
you have many of those, apply the limits in a policy). Make exemptions
at the individual mailboxes. Here you can exceed the default limit you
set in the database properties.
I wouldn't set limits on the indivual mailboxes for the receive sizes,
just the send sizes.
WHAT I CURRENTLY HAVE
We have limits for our user's mailbox size 100 MB and limits on the Send and
Receive size 10 MB. We have 3 - Exchange 2003 Back End servers and about
2000 users. I currently have the Mailbox limit defined in a system policy
with each store using the policy. My Golbal message delivery settings is
where I set the 10 MB Send and receive limits.
TASK AT HAND
I have been tasked to allow about 25 special users to be able to Send and
Receive attachments of up to 30 MB. This will also require me to increase
their mailbox size to 500 MB. These special users should not be able to
send these huge 30 MB files to other internal non-special users.
Why not? If the other users need them to accomplish their jobs they
should be able to receive them. But that brings up the question of why
one internal user would use e-mail to share a file of that size with
another internal user. A file share, ftp server, web site, or
sharepoint server would be a lot better for this.
MY SOLUTION THUS FAR
I have tried several different limit settings and have read several
Microsoft articles on how to properly set Send and Receive limits. The MS
article 322679 talks about setting size limits for Exchange but I still have
questions.
The only working solution that I have come up with thus far is to increase
the Global message delivery limit to the 30 MB maximum. This means that I
must also set the actual Send and Receive limits on each user's AD account.
My non-special users have a 10 MB Send and Receive limit and the 25 special
users are set to 30 MB. For the Mailbox size, I simply created a new
storage group on each of my 3 - E2K3 BE servers. These storage groups hold
the special users mailboxes and I created a system policy where the mailbox
size is 500 MB and applied it. The mailbox size limit design is solid and I
feel comfortable with it.
My concern is that any new user created will automatically get the Default
Send and Receive limits of whatever the Global settings are (which is 30
MB) unless I modify the template to default to 10 MB. Or, in the solution
that you suggested to create a dummy user account and contact with limits
and tell our Help Desk to always duplicate these accounts when creating new
accounts. This solution for the Default Send and Receive limits is not a
fail safe one but may be the only one that I have.
QUESTION
Is there another way to do this?
There are probably commercial tools that would provision your users
according to one classification or another.
