OCS has an address book for the Communicator client - this contains a list of everybody’s contact details. Now, this address book is generated overnight according to a schedule set in the OCS Administration tools.

As you can see from the above, the address book is set to syncronise at 1:30am every night. This is fine for general operations but sometimes you want the address book to syncronise immediately. Maybe you’ve bulk enabled some users, or you simply want to make sure it’s up to date.

It is possible to do this - and it’s pretty easy! Let’s go through the process.

First, from your server that runs the address-book service, you need to drop in a DOS prompt (Start/Run/CMD) and go to the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\Server\Core>

Pretty hideous path! As a short cut you can actually type ‘cd c:\program files\microsoft office*’ to get the main directory, and then switch into ‘Server\Core’. Quick than typing the whole thing!

There’s a single command line program that’s used for generating and the address book and syncronising it. FIrst, let’s look at generating it.

Generating the Address Book

The address book files actually contain delta changes to the original syncronisation - it cuts down on the work/bandwidth etc. Sometimes it’s worth doing a full regeneration - to do it run this command:

abserver -regenur

If you get this error you need to make sure your command prompt has elevated privileges - I.e. start with Administrator rights. Create a short-cut to CMD.exe, right-click on it and select ‘Run as Administrator’.

Now, before you can syncronise this regeneration you must wait for it to finish. How do you know it’s finished? Well, look out for eventID 30028 - AB Entires are populated successfully.

You now need to move on and syncronise the Address Book files.

Syncronising the Address Book

To do this, run this command:

abserver -syncnow

This will sync all of the address book files for you.

Pretty easy really!

Communicator Address-Book Cache

If you’re an Admin sometimes it’s worth checking you have the latest address book files - I.e. to check to make sure your bulk updates/new users are in it for example. To do that, you can delete your local copy of the files and then have Communicator download them again.

Close down communicator and delete these two files:

GalContacts.db

GalContacts.db.idx

Where will they be? Well it depends what OS you’re running but they’ll be in your local profile. For example on Windows 7 they’ll be in:

\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Applicaiton Data\<Microsoft\Communicator\<sipname>

On Windows 2008 they’ll be in:

Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Communicator\<sipname>

Make sure you have hidden files/folders showing and then just search your profile for them. Once deleted, fire up Communicator and you should see them re-populate.