Ok I admit I'm an ID10T with this. But what I'm trying to figure out is when someone creates an email and they click on the To: it brings up the GAL. Most of the info is blank in the GAL at the moment. The user name is there and the email address, I'm assuming that this info is pulled out of the users profile in AD, I found, for example, where the Title goes and where the company goes, but I cannot find where the Business Phone and Location go. The only items I can locate are Home phone and address. Any help here would be appreciated. Also how long does it take once you make the change for it to reflect in the GAL. I made a change on my profile and it's been an hour and it hasn't updated Thanks Dale

I am assuming you are running Exchange 2003 since you didn't specificy which version of Exchange you are running. Pretty much all of those attributes of a AD user account are accessible on a server that has the Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) MMC installed. There are some fields that show up in the GAL, like email addresses, that don't show up until you also install the Exchange System Manager (ESM) on the same machine that has ADUC on it. ESM adds more functionality to the ADUC. You will just need to nagivate around the various tabs to find everything. As to how often it updates, that depends on your client. Generally if your AD enviornment is small, the changes replicate around the AD within a few minutes. The more AD sites you have, the longer the changes take to replicate. However most Outook installations these days come with cache mode enabled. By default the Offline Address Book is only updated once a day (like 4 or 5AM), and the cache mode clients download that and use that all day long. Turning off cache mode brings the clients back to "online mode", which also means GAL changes show up relatively "real-time" as soon as they replicate around AD. However caching your actual mailbox is a good idea, so if you can't stand to have your GAL cached, you might consider using the Office GPO extensions to create a desktop GPO where the GAL isn't cached even if the mailbox is. Sort of the best of both worlds. Just don't set this policy for laptop users who roam as they will need to have the offline GAL accesible if they aren't on the network. Good Luck!

Thanks for the detailed answer. Very helpful and it also answered my next question as to why it takes 24 hours for the update to show in my Address book. We are using cached mode. I found that the Business Phone number is pulled from the Phone number entry on the General Tab on the users profile. Found it through trial and error. Thanks Dale