Recently (like today) I noticed that many of the employees Outlook programs were running pretty slow and even got hung up when searching through old emails and even just at random.

Lots of "trying to connect to server" messages.

Our network is doing fine and everything else seems to be running smoothly. I haven't noticed the issues much because my Outlook is set to cached exchange mode. Does that help with server performance/load?

What other things are good to check on or do to increase performance of exchange and hopefully reduce the load that the server has to take on.

I am applying updates and the like, but I doubt that will have much benefit. It is not a dedicated exchange server which I know is not optimal, but we are a small company so I can't just make this server a sole exchange server.

Any ideas would be great...I am trying to find some good ideas or procedures to implement in the future that will help lighten the system load.