Slow Outlook Startup Performance (Part 2)

In an earlier article, I discussed how Outlook startup performance suffers when Outlook Anywhere is configured on the corporate network.

I received an email from a reader, Bruce Lane from Microsoft, who mentioned that he ran across a configuration that was causing slow Outlook startup, as well.

Bruce writes,

New to Outlook 2007 is calendar caching. This allows users to see other peoples’ calendars even if they are working offline.


The problem is that this causes a tremendous amount of client<->server traffic. The problem is especially bad if the user has many other users calendars open (more than 5 or 6). The people that were experiencing the worst problems were the admin assistants for the most senior people in the organization. They often have many calendars open.


We saw horrible start up times (3 to 4 minutes) and big lags to change views caused by the calendar caching. Luckily there is a setting in the Outlook profile to disable this feature. 

Thanks very much for the tip, Bruce!