I think the compact process needs to be completed by the admin on the server side anyway.

Should be done on the server, and at night when the users are not on.

I'm torn on this one. In an environment with mail quotas it's awfully helpful for users to be able to compact their mail file on their own and not bother the IT staff. On the other hand, I also understand the impact this could have on a server's performance. And giving users access shouldn't be used as a substitute for regularly scheduled maintenance. I'm going to go ahead and promote this for now and see how it plays out.

The server should have an daily and weekly program document which does compacting of all databases automatically. You wouldn't want users to initiate a compact, and taking a lot of CPU load during work hours.

If they made the quota process smarter, this probably wouldn't be needed. However, it would be worth adding this feature, but give admins a way to disable it.

Reconfigure Domino to calculate the quota on space used in database and not the filesize in the filesystem, this way there is no need to run compact.

I completely agree with this one. As a new Domino Environment, we have not yet installed an archiving option (Commonstore), so I as an Admin am ALWAYS compacting mail files. In previous versions, users had this right, and I NEVER saw any problems caused by them doing it.

Big thumbs up! Since we are using quotas, users are constantly contacting my group to ask why their mail file (which was a few MB over quota) is still over quota after they delete a hundred MB. We have to explain how the compact task reclaims white space & that it will run as per our program doc at 8pm tonight. This of course wastes our time & makes our users angry & we start hearing the "Outlook doesn't have this issue" comments. Of course, we can also run an ad-hoc compact on a user's mail file every time we get one of these calls, but this is a poor use of our limited resources. As Tom McArthur suggests above, why not make it an option.