Shortcut Best Practice

[Col_gh]

Evening All.

I was on a training session with Symantec a while back and the discussion around managing shortcuts came to light. There is an unofficial recommendation to expire shortcuts (delete them) after 6month - 1 year.

The logic behind this is sensible, exchange performs better (less resource on views) and it is quite often the case when not if users get a little lazy (yes they do) and end up with 100 and 1000s of shortcuts all in the inbox.

The archive task has to process these each night and it is not uncommon to have in excess for several million shortcuts (oach).

I'm trying to find an official best practice or if there is a general consensus on this thought. Can anyone shed any light?

Thank you for reading.

Col.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

I think its just what suits your environment as opposed to best practice, and it will only process shortcuts each night if you have shortcut expiry/orphaned shortcut deletion/moved items enabled on the EV server What I'm seeing more and more is that with more stringen quota levels on exchange, disabling PST files on the desktop that people are expiring a lot sooner than normal and utilizing vault cache and virtual vault In theory you can have Virtual Vault eliminate the need for shortcuts, which is a good thing as fragmentation in exchange won't be so high and you will process a lot quicker on your archiving runs

[Ameen]

I have never saw a article about it but it depends on your production/bussiness.

There are multiple reason for making the shorcut expaired, one thing you have already mentioned your post. Other one main thing is that Microsoft recomend that you should not keep more than 5000 items in any of the folder in a mailbox. Imagin you have a retention category for 20 years and keeping all shorcuts in the folder!

If you open case with MS on outlook slowness issue then the first thing MS support will be asking you to clear the shorcut and make the count below 5000 before they start troubleshooting, its my experience!

[Sarah_Seftel1]

Never seen such an article, but from my experience lately - the newer our systems are, the better we are without stubs…

For example, in exchange 2010, paging size has changed, and although a stub will hold between 5kb to 20kb in user’s outlook, it will hold 32kb in exchange edb. Which means that exchange DB’s will grow rapidly if stubs are in use.

Sarah

[Mike_Yee]

As JesusWept3 alluded to, it's based more on your environment.  You could use report mode to see how many expired shortcuts you have in each mailbox based on the setting you've chosen.  It would probably make sense to base line how many shortcuts your system can delete per hour with a very high number, for example set the Delete shortcuts in folders vaule to 5 Years.  Once you've established your performance value, use your knowledge about your archiving window to set a reasonable value for the Shortcut deletion that can be accomplished on a nightly basis and gradually reduce it to the desired value.