Outlook Address Book This address book does not require you to use an Exchange account. The Outlook Address Book is created automatically and contains the contacts in your default Contacts folder that have either email addresses or fax numbers listed.
These contacts are displayed in the Address Book dialog box when you click Contacts in the Address Book list. Step 1: Open a folder in Windows, then paste the following path into the address box of the folder, and press the Enter key. See screen shot below:. Step 2: Now you will see the Offline Address Books folder in the opening folder.
Outlook Address Book Location You may know Outlook will save offline address books of Exchange account automatically, but do you know which folder the offline address books are saved in?
The server has to generate the offline address book more frequently. It might take hours to complete, depending on the size of Active Directory.
For each update, Outlook must make a copy of the offline address book in the local computer and apply the incremental changes that are fetched from the server. If the offline address book on the local computer is MB, Outlook would have to create a copy of that much data with each update. Outlook has a "throttling" mechanism that slows down the offline address book update when user activity is detected. Depending on the size of the offline address book, the update can take anywhere from one hour to eight hours if there is continuous user activity.
If you want to increase the frequency of your updates, make sure your offline address book is reasonably small. A good size is in the range of 1 MB to 25 MB, uncompressed. To customize the generation of these files on the server, follow these steps.
Exchange Server and Exchange Sever Right-click the offline address list that you specified for your mailbox store, and then click Properties. In the result pane, click the Offline Address Book tab, and then select the offline address book that you want to configure.
If you have increased the generation frequency of the offline address book files on your Exchange computer, you can also increase the frequency of the client offline address book downloads.
To do this:. Click your Exchange account, and then click to select the Include the selected account in this group check box. Under Select the options you want for the selected account group, make sure that the only check box that is selected is Download offline address book , and then click OK.
Q Can I programmatically download an offline address book through the Outlook object model? A No. Offline address book downloads are not exposed through the Outlook object model. Q I added a new user to Active Directory, but the user does not show up in Outlook. A The offline address book is not up to date. Two events must occur before the changes show up in Outlook:. The server must generate the offline address book and include the changes in the differential files.
If you are sure that the first event has occurred, you can perform a manual download of the offline address book. To do this, follow these steps:. If you make frequent changes to the offline address book, you may want to modify the way that Outlook computers on your network access the Address Book. You can disable the downloading of the offline address book and force the Outlook computers to use the online Global Address List when they use Cached Exchange Mode.
For more information about how to do this, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: How to prevent users from downloading the Offline Address Book without disabling Cached Exchange Mode As per this article, if offline address book. To use this setting, you must set the registry value, remove any. Q What is the effect of offline address book downloads on the network?
Will offline address book downloads flood the network? A When a cached mode profile is started for the first time, Outlook downloads the full offline address book from the server.
This can affect the network, especially if multiple clients are starting up at the same time. Other cases when Outlook clients require full offline address book downloads are described in question Differential downloads are not expected to cause a huge network impact if all the clients update the differential files on a daily basis.
Outlook has the following safeguards that help protect the network from excessive offline address book downloads:. In the default configuration, Outlook will only try one full offline address book download in a hour period.
An attempt is counted when Outlook receives a response from the server and can at least start the offline address book download. In the default configuration, Outlook does not limit the number of attempts for differential updates. If a differential update fails, Outlook will retry the update after waiting one hour.
Also, Outlook will not perform any full or incremental offline address book downloads if the client is running in header-only mode. To manually switch to header-only mode, point to Exchange Cached Mode on the File menu, and then click Download Headers. Note The header-only mode configuration will only work with Exchange Q Under what conditions will Outlook perform a full offline address book download? A Outlook in cached mode will perform full offline address book download when the following conditions are true:.
There is no offline address book on the client computer. This condition may occur if Outlook has not performed an initial complete synchronization. The total size of the differential files is greater than one-eighth the size of the full offline address book. In this case, Outlook downloads the full offline address book for better performance.
This condition may occur if there are lots of Active Directory objects that have a change to an attribute that is in the offline address book. For example, phone numbers are updated with a new area code, departments are added to all users in Active Directory, and new address types are added. To modify the one-eighth rule, follow these steps. Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry.
However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it.
Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:.
This setting example 4 permits Outlook to download differential offline address book files that are up to one-fourth the size of the full offline address book.
The parent distinguished name table changes. When this behavior occurs, all Outlook clients will also try to perform a full download. A parent distinguished name is the part of a distinguished name also known as DN in an earlier Exchange format, not including the final relative distinguished name also known as RDN. The parent distinguished name table is the set of all parent distinguished names that are found in Active Directory. They come from the legacyExchangeDN attribute and from the proxyAddresses attribute, and they start with the following prefix:.
This means that x addresses for users who were migrated from another organization will not be included. There is a differential file missing on the server. Outlook cannot update to the current version without it. This behavior may occur if one of the following conditions is true:.
You did not start Outlook to log on to your Exchange mailbox for more than 30 days. The server policy permits only 30 days of differential files. The server was reset, or it crashed before it could post the differential files but after it was able to post the full offline address book files on the public folder.
The version on the server and the version on the client do not match. There is a more recent version of the offline address book present on the server. For example, Version 3a Unicode offline address book is now available, and you previously downloaded a Version 2 offline address book. Applying changes to the offline address book failed. For example, differential files are corrupted on the server. Corruption may occur if the server goes down during differential file generation.
A change to the legacyDN table occurred. One or more offline address book files were not present on the client computer. For example, a user accidentally deletes one of the. Note Outlook will not perform a full download if there is a disk-space problem on the client computer.
This restriction helps safeguard the network against excessive downloads. Q Is there any compression of the data during an offline address book download? A To save bandwidth, the offline address book is compressed to less than one-third of its full size during the download. You can see the full offline address book files by using Outlook Web Access with a URL that is similar to the following:. If there are user certificates in the offline address book, this will add approximately 1 KB per certificate.
Q Outlook shows the "Updating Address Book" status for a long time. A Outlook has a throttling feature that slows the address book update when you are working in Outlook. Outlook is helping you complete other activities and does not allow the address book update to interfere. A In computers with slow hard disk drives, such as some earlier portable computers, the process of updating the address book can slow down the computer if the hard disk is fragmented.
To improve offline address book download performance, try defragmenting your hard disk. In fact, Outlook cached mode will continue to download the offline address book every 24 hours regardless of whether the option is enabled. Note To locate this option, follow these steps for your version of Outlook: Outlook or later versions:. When you click to select the Download offline address book check box and then click Address Book Settings , the Offline Address Book dialog box appears. In this dialog box, you can specify either No Details or Full Details.
These settings affect the offline address book download. For example, if you select No Details , a no-details version will be automatically downloaded to your computer during an offline address book download.
Q How can I determine whether my client is performing a full offline address book download? A To have Outlook display a dialog box that prompts you before the offline address book download starts, follow these steps.
Type 1, and then click OK. Set this value to 1 to display the prompt. Set it to 0 to not display the prompt. When Outlook starts the offline address book download, a dialog box prompts you to select whether you want to perform a full download. If you click No , Outlook will prompt you again after one hour.
However, Outlook only deletes the offline address book files that belong to the current profile. If you create a new Unicode profile, you may still see some old ANSI offline address book files if these files are associated with another Outlook profile. Q How can I indicate that I want exact alias matching with the offline address book? A When you use Outlook in cached mode, a registry setting controls how names are matched to the offline address book. By default, name fragments are matched to all naming fields, not just to the e-mail alias.
For example, the following table contains examples of how names are resolved in Outlook in cached mode. If you type bobb in an Address field, Outlook resolves "bobb" to both entries in cached mode. You can indicate that you want an exact match for an e-mail alias by typing an equal sign before the e-mail alias text. If you are using Outlook in cached mode, you can turn on exact e-mail alias matching without having to use the equal sign.
To use this function, follow these steps. Click Start , click Run , type regedit, and then click OK. Setting this value to 1 enables exact matching. A The offline address book supports name resolution indexes against the following properties only:. Conversely, Active Directory is configurable. Your administrator can set the server to resolve names against any set of properties.
If Active Directory had the display name set to "Lastname, Firstname," the following values would be indexed for the properties in the sample user information:. In this configuration, you cannot find this user if you type "Marcelo. If installing SP2 is not an option, you must perform additional steps for non-SP2 clients. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:.
This can reduce the effectiveness of cached mode because Outlook must have the global catalog server to resolve names.
Q I cannot resolve proxy addresses now. If these fields do not meet your requirements, you can force Outlook to resolve proxy addresses. Please see the details in article for additional information.
Q Can I add a custom property to the offline address book? You cannot add custom properties directly to the offline address book. This can cause remote procedure call RPC traffic to the server and can cause delays if these properties are published to the General tab.
