We moved our Exchange services from hosted to onsite recently. Our hosting company setup an address book in public folders for an attached company. However, this didn't work very well, whenever we updated the address book file, it would disappear from the users address book dialog. So we moved onsite, I imported a CSV into our AD as mail contacts. Perfect, nobody can complain about not having the contacts now, except that now they complain they have too many contacts. I've been looking, but can't seem to find the correct way to do this. We do not want any mail contacts to appear in the GAL. I'd like for them to appear in a secondary GAL. I read this: http://exchangeshare.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/multiple-global-address-list-gal-in-exchange-2007/ But since that's 2007, and we're running 2010 w/ all updates, and I've heard bad things about trying to do things in 2010 that are meant for 2007, I thought I'd ask. Exchange 2010 w/ all updates on a 2003 AD.

There is currently no supported mechanism for multiple GALs in Exchange 2010. That will change with Exchange 2010 SP2 we believe. Your only option is to use public folders. Not sure what was happening about when you updated the public folders in the past. I have been using public folders as an address book for many years and as long as the folder is left alone with only permissions changes. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

Our hosting company took the CSV we provided quarterly, imported it as an Address book, then replaced the previous address book. This worked, but if the users left Outlook open overnight, it would lose it's connection when it was replaced. Is there a better way to do the address book in public folders?

Without knowing exactly what they did in the background it is hard to say. I expect they replaced the public folder, so it was a new public folder. Even if it had the same name, as far as Exchange and Outlook are concerned, it was a different folder. As you cannot import contacts directly in to a public folder, if you want to replace them every quarter then the best way to do that is to import them in to a folder in Outlook in someone's mailbox, then in the original public folder remove all of the existing contacts and replace them. As long as the folder itself is left alone then things will not break client side. If these contacts change frequently, then set the permissions so that users (all or a subset) can update the content themselves. The major issue with contacts in AD is that the information gets stale very quickly. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

Okay thanks for the information. I'll delete all the mail contacts I created and start on the public folder solution. I found out the hard way that AD info gets stale quickly. When we created the mailboxes, I found that we never updated the users' phone numbers when we changed phone systems 2 years ago. (Never had to) Now I have to go through and change 250+ users by hand.

Okay thanks for the information. I'll delete all the mail contacts I created and start on the public folder solution. I found out the hard way that AD info gets stale quickly. When we created the mailboxes, I found that we never updated the users' phone numbers when we changed phone systems 2 years ago. (Never had to) Now I have to go through and change 250+ users by hand. dsmod is your friend, thats what we used to mass populate phone extension information for a Cisco Phone upgrade.