Outlook 2003 not updating their Offline Address Book (OAB)

This annoying thing can happen quite often when you are using Microsoft Outlook 2003 clients in conjunction with Exchange 2007 servers. If you happen to google out there you’ll have a lot of “heavy” manipulations (going up to the reinstallation of Exchange, deleting the OWA part….). The solution to that problem is much simpler !

The behaviors is as following :

- Outlook 2007 adress book is up to date

- Outlook 2003 is out of date with partial/bogus/old entries

What happens here is some kind of ‘magic’ made in Microsoft. Once a day Microsoft Exchange will update the default adress book (or your adress book) now when something goes wrong it tells you doesn’t tells you. So you happen to go on unsuspectful of what happenned until some user calls you with a strange problem of “adress book not showing everything”.

• If the user or group main email (the reply to) is different from the email adress defined in the Active Directory directory the contact won’t be updated and skipped during the next OAB generation. I’m not entirely sure but this problem seemed to have been fixed with the service pack 1 and the two smallers updates but it seems not.

step1 :

You have to parse the entire directory to check that the user/group main email is the same as the one defined in the Exchange system. (ok there are way to speed up that with a few witty scripts). However you can speed up checking only the differences inbetween the “old list” and the actual list.

step2:

Force the update of the OAB with the following cmdlet; don’t use the Exchange 2007 GUI it is pointless in that case

Update-OfflineAddressBook -Identity offlineAdressbookname

What will happens…is nothing. You have to check in the event log if anything went wrong.

However after having done those steps you’ll see that the lists are up to date so far.