Maximizing Performance with Outlook, Office 365 & MacroView

Basic Tips

1. Clean Up & Compact

A smaller Outlook mailbox size will perform better, especially if your computer is a few years old. Start with the often overlooked Outlook ribbon Clean Up button and select the Clean Up folder. This will move all the redundant emails from your conversations to the Outlook recycle bin. You can set MacroView to automatically delete the emails from Outlook on completing the Bulk Save, or you can delete them manually as required.

Ensure that your Outlook recycle bin is empty and then run the Compact Now command to complete the mailbox housekeeping exercise.

Tip: Detach any PST files attached, as this will consume memory and slow things down.

2. Disable Non-Essential Add-ins

Over time several add-ins would have been installed into your Outlook user profile. Each of these add-ins needs to be loaded into memory before starting Outlook. Add-ins that are no longer used still load, contributing to the slower startup of Outlook. Disabling the non-essential add-ins should see an improvement in start times as well as stability.

3. Minimise Logging

Ensure that your logging level for the MacroView client is set to exception rather than information, especially on a shared server disk system. Even on a single workstation, information level logging can noticeably slow things down as all current processes are being recorded to the c: drive.

Note: Only enable the information ‘transactional’ logging if requested by the support team.

4. Unlock your Memory

Most likely, your Windows is running 64-bit with Office 32-bit. Ensure that your Outlook version supports LAA. LAA unlocks 300% more usable memory than usual. Use the Office 64-bit release, if supported by your organisation.

Tip: Use System Internals Vmma, available for free download, to determine the available application memory.

5. Cache your Outlook

By default, recent versions of Outlook have the offline email cache set to 12 months. If you plan on archiving your older emails, we suggest caching them as it is much faster to save them when the emails are stored on your c: drive. This assumes that you have plenty of free disk space.

6. Reduce your File List

It is very tempting to increase your file list count from 50 upwards, as ‘scrolling’ is generally preferable to ‘paging’. We have seen cases where people have raised the setting well beyond 500 and then complained of slowness. To display 500 files on one page rather than the default of 50 takes much longer as more metadata details are needed to be retrieved. We recommend that you don’t change the default file list setting and use the column filters available in your file list. Alternatively, use the search this location feature with a metadata search term.

7. Get a Fast Disk

Going back a few years, performance problems were usually related to the processor or lack of system memory. Times have changed; especially with Windows 10, the hard disk has become the bottleneck. Starting Windows, compiling applications and ongoing updates means a solid state drive (SSD) is now a must-have.

8. Delay Non-Critical Updates

Frequent Microsoft updates can be highly frustrating. However, there is no reason to continuously run updates. Delaying non-essential updates, in some cases, allows Microsoft to refine them further before they are installed. We recommend that you don’t have monthly updates enabled for Office 365 ProPlus, as these have been known to cause intermittent issues. The most practical version to use is the semi-annual release.

Advanced Tips

1. Exclude Program Files

Some security programs continuously scan the entire workstation for threats leading to poor computer responsiveness. Making some minor changes to your virus scanner software can have a positive impact without compromising security. For example, the MacroView program files folder were already scanned on installation and are not updated during general use, so why not create an exclusion path for this location? We have seen greatly improved Outlook startup times when the exclusion path is set.

2. Virtualized Desktops

When sharing hardware resources for Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix Xendesk, Remote Desktop Services and other virtualized environments, you need to ensure sufficient memory, high-speed disks and a suitable graphics adapter. MacroView software relies on Microsoft WPF to create its modern interface, which in some cases can be graphics display intensive. The MacroView client also passes most write operations via the %appdata% folder, which, when shared, could slow performance.

Tip: To minimise disk activity, ensure that logging for MacroView is set to exception rather than information.