Forcing/Manually Generating Offline Address Book on Exchange 2007/2010

Whilst you shouldn’t need to force an update of the OAB if you’re in a hurry run through the below steps.

Login to the mailbox server hosting the OAB and run the below command

Update-OfflineAddressBook “Offline Address List” – If you’re unsure of the name of your OAB run Get-OfflineAddressBook |FL (this will also show you where it is being hosted)

Wait a few minutes then check the Application event logs, there should be an event regarding OAB updates, if it was successful then run.

Update-FileDistributionService -Identity “CASServer” -Type “OAB”

This should be run on every CAS server however as it will happen automatically anyway if it’s only one site that needs the update immediately you could just specify that CAS server. Otherwise run the below command to force all CAS servers to download the updates.

Get-ClientAccessServer | Update-FileDistributionService -type “OAB”

Please note, even once this has been completed successfully Outlook still won’t have the new OAB as it will need to be downloaded manually (by default Outlook will download the OAB once a day or on start-up)

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/download-the-offline-address-book-HA010153532.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841273

One way around all this is to check out the below post

http://www.howexchangeworks.com/2011/09/finding-new-user-in-gal-while-in.html