Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003

Offline Access Versus Remote Access

Using Outlook in offline mode and using remote access are actually two different scenarios. Think of them as two sides of the same coin. When you work offline with Outlook, you don't have any sort of connection to your Exchange Server. You might not have any network connection at all, or you might be connected to a network that isn't your own. You have no interaction with the messages actually stored on your Exchange Server and instead are working with only messages stored on your local computer. You can perform just about any operation on any message stored in your Offline Folders file. You can read messages that have been downloaded to your Offline Folders file, reply to those messages, compose new messages, ...