Hi, I have couple of doubts on Offline Address book generation and its distribution in Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 context. When does outlook clients, which are in cached mode, get the OAB updated?How to determine the time, when the client gets these updates? How any outlook client identifies OAB server? During maintainannce on public folder, it does sitefolder check and tries to create them. Why does it create these folders so often? What happens to the content, which is posted by OABGEN server during its schedule? Why does it create folders for each Admin Group and what is the significance of these folders? I have gone through many articles in technet, but it was very confusing me. Thanks a lot for your replies in advance. Regards Jayasimha Jayasimha Puppala

On Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:00:19 +0000, Jayasimha wrote: >I have couple of doubts on Offline Address book generation and its distribution in Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 context. > >When does outlook clients, which are in cached mode, get the OAB updated? Typically, when they first start Outlook. If the server is very busy it will tell the Outlook client to "back off". Outlook will try downloading the OAB at some time later (the time delta is randomized to prevent all the clients fro trying to start the download within the same short period of time). >How to determine the time, when the client gets these updates? Precisely? You can't. It's unlikey that any server dealing with large numbers of client accesses will be able to sustain the workload -- which is why the clients are instructed to "back off". >How any outlook client identifies OAB server? Outlook clients don't care about which server generates the OAB. They get the download from a replicat of the appropriate OAB site folder. >During maintainannce on public folder, it does sitefolder check and tries to create them. Why does it create these folders so often? Folders are created only once. >What happens to the content, which is posted by OABGEN server during its schedule? It's stored as an item in the OAB public folder. >Why does it create folders for each Admin Group and what is the significance of these folders? I don't remember it creating more than one set of folder, and those were created in the AG that was running the OAB generation. There's one folder for each version of the OAB. Older Outlook clients don't understand the newformat of the OAB so there are copies of the folder for each version of the OAB. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Resources: Administering the offline address book in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007James Luo TechNet Subscriber Support (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/ms788697.aspx) If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com