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Global Address Issue

A user came up to me yesterday and notified me that they could not find a user that was added last week in Exchange.  Upon some initial testing of my own I discovered that the user can be found if you type part of his name and hit Ctrl+K that it will resolve the name but does not appear in the GAL.  Then I disabled Exchange Cached Mode and users that were in his list that have been gone for some time were gone and the new user appeared.  My first thought is that the OST file was corrupted so I rebooted the machine and logged in as myself and deleted the file.  This did no good and has led to more confusion on my part.  

This is a wide spread issue on my network and need to find a solution.  I support about 70 machines on my own and would like to find a solution that can be deployed rather than desk visits.  I looked around and found tons of articles with no progress toward solving this enigma.

Windows Server 2008 R2
Exchange 2010 Version 14.2 (Build 247.5)
Windows XP / 7
MS Outlook 2007 SP3
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Andy Andy
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Hello

Can you please check below things

1. Can the user able to lookup in OWA ?
2.only one user is not appearing in Address book ? if yes, then please hide it from address list and do apply OK and then unhide it and do apply OK, HOPE THIS WILL RESOLVE THE ISSUE IF SINGLE USER IMPACTED.
3. also confirm, all user not able to lookup that particular user in thier address book ?

Thanks
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ASKER

OWA works fine.  Works fine outside of Cached Mode.  Don't understand number 2.  For point 3 no one can see him until I take them off cached mode but once I put them back on the address book reverts.  If I try to do a send and receive to re-download the address book it just sits there and never completes.
2 point...from exchange server side...go to properties of user and hide the mailbox ...click Ok...then unhide it and click OKand see if this can results
Avatar of Simon Butler (Sembee)
If the user appears in OWA, it isn't a GAL issue, but an OAB issue. Sounds like the OAB may not be updating correctly.

In EMS run

get-offlineaddressbook | update-offlineaddressbook

Wait at least 30 minutes then look for any errors in the event viewer about OAB generation.

Simon.
Andy I tried your 2nd point with no results.  Simon i am trying your suggestion now.
Can you please try downloading the address book manually in outlook.
Simon I tried your suggestion and it's a no go.  Saw no change.

Andy when I try to manually download the address book in outlook it just sits there.  As an experiment I started the manual download process before I left on Friday and this morning when I came in it was still trying to download.

I came across an article this weekend and on a hunch I went to see what files were in the same directory as the ost file and found like 6 oab files in the same directory.  The article suggested deleting the ost file.  I am curious if you could just delete the oab files and leave the ost file?  The GAL is maybe 5 Mb soak and wet.  I have some users with extremely large mailboxes that take a very long time to sync so avoiding deleting the ost is something I would like to avoid.
Deleting the OAB file will cause a full download of the OAB - that isn't a bad thing and is worth a try. Shutdown Outlook, making sure that outlook.exe is gone from task manager.

Then start Outlook up and it will download the OAB fresh.
If that doesn't work, then you will have to start looking at the OAB configuration itself.

Simon.
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BMCISAdmin
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Not really a fix but more of a band-aid