On the road with cached mode

So, this is my first real opportunity to test Outlook 2003’s cached mode on a real road trip; I’m in Seattle for an Exchange 2003 airlift. I use Outlook 2003 for three accounts: my home account, my work account, and my Microsoft account. The first two are homed on the same server (for the time being), fronted by ISA Server so I can access them without a VPN. The third requires me to VPN in to Microsoft; at least, it did before I enabled RPC over HTTP yesterday.
I made sure to let Outlook catch up my MS mailbox before I left, with the happy result that I could plow through the 2500+ unread messages in it while flying to Seattle, but I ignored the other two to give cached mode a fair trial. When I arrived at the hotel, I plugged in my laptop, signed on to the in-room broadband connection ,and ttweaked my HOSTS file to point to the external IP of the mail server. While unpacking, I let my personal account sync; while brushing my teeth and sleeping, I let the work account catch up. When I awoke, I had a full inbox, which for me is the equivalent of having the morning paper waiting on the front step when I get up. I was able to blitz through the accumulated mail and get right to work. I left the hotel and went over to the convention center for breakfast and registration. After registering, I was able to plug in to a network drop, quickly pick up new mail in all three accounts, and enter the keynote session. Throughout the day, I could pop in and out to send queued replies and pick up new messages with a minimum of disruption. If only synchronizing offline files worked as well as this does! Big kudos to the Outlook team for building something that “just works”.