Exchange 2007: Persons missing in Offline Address Book

Written byBy: Mario Rimann.

Recently we encountered an issue that new staff was missing in the address list within Outlook. Due to this, the team leader couldn't open calendar or even free/busy information of his new team members. First we looked up the permissions on the calendar - but everything looked correct.

After 45min of headache we found out, that the offline address book (OAB) was not generated at all. On the Exchange 2007 server the event viewer showed an error, but without useful information (just that it couldn't create the list).

And once again Google helped me to find a solution. It led me to some pages and on one of them, I found a link to a Microsoft knowledgebase article.

The cause and the solution are so small - unbelieveable:

The reason for all the hassle

If the Email attribute of a user account in the Active Diretory is not equal to another attribute of this record, the process that generates the offline address book will fail with errors.

We could track it down to a single user that caused this issue with the following PowerShell command, ran from the Exchange Management Shell (EMS):

get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited | Where-Object {$_.PrimarySMTPAddress -ne $_.WindowsEmailAddress}

This will list all mailboxes / user accounts, where this dangerous situation applies.

In our case, this command returned exactly one person. And it was exactly that person, that we had to create manually instead of with our "createUser" script. Reason for that was the very long name of this person (long firstname + long lastname = too many characters for the login name).

The solution for it

The knowledgebase article also gives us another bit of PowerShell code that fixes the problem:

get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited | Where-Object {$_.PrimarySMTPAddress -ne $_.WindowsEmailAddress} | foreach { set-mailbox $_.identity -windowsemailaddress $_.primarySMTPAddress }

For this, the same command as before is called again. And it's results are passed over to a foreach loop that fixes it for every returned person.

After that, re-generate the offline address book again, control the event log and test it. It worked out in our case :-)