Office365 on RDSH / XenApp Tips

This article contains some important tips on getting Office365 to play nicely on RDSH / XenApp - something that doesn't exactly happen out of the box as you probably know.

Marius provides tips in the following areas:

• Federation and sync
• Installing and managing updates
• Optimizing Office ProPlus for VDI/RDS
• Office ProPlus optimal delivery
• Shared Computer Support
• Skype for Buisness
• Outlook
• OneDrive
• Troubleshooting and general tips for tuning
• Remote display protocols and when to use when.

If you only read one part of it, read this part about Outlook on RDSH. Which for many is quite the headache…. and that is most because of the OST files that is dropped in the %localappdata% folder for each user. Office ProPlus has a setting called fast access which means that Outlook will in most cases try to contact Office365 directly, but if the latency is becoming to high, the connection will drop and it will go and search trough the OST files.

Now this is the big elephant in the room and causes the most headaches. Since Outlook against Office365 can be setup in two modes either using Cached mode and the other using Online mode. Online modes uses direct access to Office365 but users loose features like instant search and such. In order to deliver a good user experience we need to compromise, the general guideline here is to configure cached mode with 3 months, and define to store the OST file (Which contains the emails, calender, etc) and is typically 60-80% than the email folder) on a network share. Since these OST files are by default created in the local appdata profile and using streaming profile management solutions aren’t typically a good fit for the OST file.

Important to note that Microsoft supports having OST files on a network share, IF! there is adequate bandwidth and low latency… and only if there is one OST file and the users have Outlook 2010 SP1

NOTE: We can use other alternatives such as FSLogix, Unidesk to fix the Profile management in a better way.

Source and more: https://msandbu.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/office365-on-terminal-server-done-right/