Some more snippets of blog posts…
Reducing the size of your Outlook offline store
Tim Anderson commented recently that he’d noticed how recreating his Outlook offline store (.OST) file was more effective than compressing it. I decided to give mine a go (especially as my recently shrunken Inbox means there wouldn’t be much to re-sync).
Seems to be a good idea to delete and recreate Outlook 2013 OST from time to time. File size reduced from 48GB to 4GB.
— Tim Anderson (@timanderson) January 7, 2015
Unfortunately, my IT admins appear to have locked down my configuration via group policy so I couldn’t disable/re-enable cached mode. @p3rfact came up with a suggestion that worked though:
@Outlook @markwilsonit can you rename the old OST while Outlook is not running? Should create a new one with smaller size I think — I am (@p3rfact) January 7, 2015
As it happens, my file was not that large – although recreating it did reduce the size by around 25%.
Clearing out users from Yammer
Yammer networks can be synchronised with Active Directory using Yammer Directory Sync but ours is not (for various reasons). There is a pretty simple workaround though for clearing out users from Yammer who have left the company (credit due to @AlanPurchase for working this one out):
- From the Network Admin view in Yammer, export a .CSV file with all the users in the network.
- Open the .CSV file in Excel and filter on the state field to show active users and on the email field to include domains that you are interested in (for example, I only wanted those in our UK organisation).
- Cut and paste email addresses into a new email in Outlook, then use Ctrl+K to resolve the names against the Global Address List. Anyone that isn’t in the GAL will not have their email address resolved.
- In Yammer, remove each of the users that are no longer in the organisation – you have the option to remove their posts or leave their posts and remove the account (more details in Microsoft knowledge base article 2820235).
GPS Track Editing
I’ve blogged before about how I log all of my bike rides, runs, etc. – it’s sad, but I like to see where I went on a map – and to know how I performed. Every once on a while, things go wrong though – like one time last summer when my Garmin suddenly decided I was several miles away and the route I was following became nonsense. The only answer was to reset the thing and start tracking again (breaking my ride into multiple tracks).
I found a free GPS Track Editor that helped me to merge/edit tracks (directly editing the XML in GPX files is a chore) and create something that at least represented the route I was on (although it does have one section that is a dead straight line “joining the gap” between my two usable tracks – it should actually follow the road via Whittlebury)!
Mark, I do the ost delete regularly. But it can be easier- just close outlook and then delete the OST, it’ll be in users\\appdata\local\Microsoft\outlook. IIRC. There’ll be one per mail account in the profile.
Sorry Peter, I should have been clearer – that’s exactly what I did. Rename is just to save a copy of the old one – deletion will allow re-creation.