Tuesday, August 16, 2011

How To : Update Offline Address Book(OAB), and distribute to all users immediately

Due to some reason, my customer wants to update the OAB and distribute to all users immediately today. Here is it can be done:

Normally Exchange will run into maintenance mode at daily 5am(by default),during this time, Exchange will distribute the latest version of OAB to all users. User’s outlook client will automatically download the OAB generated by Exchange during next logon.

Today I’ll show you how to make a force update and distribution of OAB to user manually without waiting for Exchange to enter maintenance mode.

First,open EMC in Exchange server, under Organization pane, click the Offline Address Book tab, right-click on the Default Offline Address book and select Update.

Once it is done, open Services on CAS server. Look for a service name Microsoft Exchange File Distribution and restart the service. 

Once the service is restarted, Exchange will automatically distribute the updated OAB to all users, where users can see the changes\updated OAB without waiting till Exchange enter maintenance mode.