Four Best Practices to Make the Most of Stubbing (Part 2 of 2)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

In my last post, I introduced the concept of stubbing and listed some of its benefits and drawbacks. This post will look at four best practices that businesses should follow if they rely on stubbing in their organization.

1. If you can train users to search for older messages, don’t stub
One of the easiest ways to address storage management challenges is to impose mailbox quotas and provide users with access to search the archive (preferably directly within Outlook).  You can reduce the end-user maintenance burden by applying automated cleanup rules on users’ mailboxes (particularly the sent and deleted items folders) with the tools included in Exchange (Mailbox Manager for 2003, Managed Folders for 2007).  Many companies have found that imposing clear age limits on the data that lives in Exchange (i.e. only the last 90 days of mail is in the mailbox) makes it easy for end-users to understand what to look for where.

2. Only stub attachments, not messages
Stubbing messages has a significant impact on end-user experience.  In general this means message the preview window in Outlook doesn’t work unless client-side software is deployed.  From an Exchange server perspective, since most attachments aren’t single instanced (due to Office’s updates on metadata) you will get most of the storage benefit without materially impacting the number of objects in the database if you focus on stubbing attachments, but leave the message itself intact.

3. Apply consistent stubbing policies across users within the same mailbox database
As described above, if a message is delivered to multiple users in the same mailbox database, but you only stub for some of them you can actually increase storage requirements.  While most tools allow you to specify stubbing rules on a per-mailbox basis, you should really consider re-organizing your mailboxes to assign policies within a given mailbox database if you need to.

4. Time stubbing processes to complete before a full backup starts
Most companies perform incremental backups on a nightly basis and full backups once per week.  Incremental backups of an Exchange store take less time than full backups when a small proportion of the content has changed since the last backup (assuming that you use an Exchange store-aware agent).  Since stubbing can result in significant changes, you can end up with incremental backups that take as long a full backup would.  As a result, it is wise to plan your stubbing window to occur in the period between the last of the incremental backups and the start of your full backup window.