Despite the benefits of giving users large electronic mailboxes, many administrators have been reluctant to do so because of the costs and complexity involved. However, those costs can be reduced and that complexity simplified making large mailboxes a more viable solution with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

That’s what Microsoft maintains in a recent white paper, “The Microsoft Large Mailbox Vision: Giving users large mailboxes without breaking your budget.” In the document, the company explains how new features in Exchange 2010 can reduce storage costs, as well as improve the operation of existing systems.

What’s wrong with small mailboxes? For one thing, they require user intervention to manage. Users are forced to make decisions on what should be saved, archived or deleted in order to stay within size limits. Not only do those decisions waste valuable time for users, but they can result in important organizational knowledge being trashed.

Faced with the prospect of reviewing an onerous number of emails, some users take shortcuts to avoid the burdensome task. One typical shortcut is dumping emails into .PST files. That creates a whole new set of problems. Universal access to the emails is lost because the files can be accessed only on the machines they were created on. If the files are corrupted, oftentimes there’s no way to recover the data in them. What’s more, since the files are outside the Exchange infrastructure, they can be difficult to search–a serious problem should an organization be hit with an electronic discovery order in a lawsuit.

One way Exchange can reduce the costs associated with larger mailboxes is by allowing organizations to substitute lower performance, higher capacity disk storage for high performance, lower capacity disks.

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