Comments on: VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta – Run Multiple Copies of Outlook/Exchange via Unity

By: Using Outlook 2010 with More than One Exchange Account Crashes Regularly « Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:15:32 +0000

[...] one Exchange account at a time. People have been asking for this for years and it looked promising, in the past there was a work-around using virtualization but it was very resource intensive for most people’s machines. Since I ditched Office for Mac [...]

By: Johnny

Johnny — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:44:26 +0000

Thanks a lot for sharing this information has really proven to be helpful. I really enjoy reading easy articles leading straight to the point.

By: vinf

vinf — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:20:54 +0000

Interesting alternative.. although if you actually had to pay for the server OS licencing you’d be spending a fair chunk of money.

I’ve used a similar approach in the past to run management tools that won’t install on XP/Vista.

By: Garry

Garry — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:04:58 +0000

Great article, but for people not willing to use beta s/w not the best option. Here’s another suggestion, likely costing less memory as well.

Create a VM running a version of Windows Server with Terminal Services installed and enabled for user logins.
Be sure to use the Enterprise Editions of the server OS, as they only support the Terminal Services where more than 2 Remote Desktop users are allowed. This can be anything from Windows Server 2000 and newer, but Windows Server 2008 allows you to use Seamless Remote Desktop Applications, just like Citrix Presentation Server.

Enter the “Install” mode and install Outlook onto the server in the VM. Do any other configuration you may want, then switch back to “Execute” mode.

Create as many user accounts as you need for the different environments you log in to on your Terminal Server. Log in with each user and create the appropiate Outlook settings. Log out of your server in the VM after creating each user.

Now you can log in to the server using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) using the appropriate user account. Before you hit connect, configure the Terminal Services Client to start the application Outlook. Don’t forget to save the connection in a *.RDP file.

Now you can directly connect to an appropiate Outlook connection and have them active at the same time. By logging in with the correct user account, the proper Outlook settings are loaded for that user.

The great thing is that you can start many sessions from one VM, saving some memory.

Hope this was useful,
Garry

By: Dmitriy

Dmitriy — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:44:44 +0000

Nice! Exactly what I needed. Thanks for the detailed write-up!