Issues with Personal Contacts/Address Books in Outlook 2003

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Guest

Hello everyone,

We are in quite a jam. We are using Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise R2,
with Outlook 2003.

This past weekend we had a planned power outage in our data center.
Exchange was down for several hours but the Outlook clients were still
connected when we turned the server down.

Now, all of our users' personal contact lists are not available when
creating a new email message in Outlook 2003. Also, the feature that
suggests email addresses alphabetically when you start typing in the "To:"
line doesn't pop up for some people. To better explain what I mean, when
users open a new email message and begin to add recipients, Outlook would
generate a dropdown list with a recent contacts, even contacts that have
never been added to a users contact list, now, nothing happens. Is there a
way to restore that feature?

I know that the PAB is a "service" in OL2003 and can be turned on at each
outlook client so users can access their personal Contacts while generating
an email. However, is there a way to enable this service from one
administrative location (like Exchange/AD/Group Policy)? Has anyone
encountered the other issue we are having with the auto dropdown list in the
"To:" field?

Please assist,

Chris Barbosa
 
Let's clear up a couple of misconceptions here:

-- The Personal Address Book is a separate .pab file used in early versions of Outlook. It has nothing to do with the contacts stored on the Exchange server, and it is highly unlikely that you're using it in Outlook 2003.

-- The list of name suggestions is also not associated with the data on the Exchange server. It's stored in a separate .nk2 file associated with the user's mail profile. From your description, it sounds possible that the file might be corrupt. You didn't create new user profiles on the clients or new mail profiles, did you?
Now, all of our users' personal contact lists are not available when
creating a new email message in Outlook 2003.
Click to expand...

This sounds like the heart of the problem, but you haven't given us much in the way of actual symptoms. Could you describe what uses see in the address book dialog? Have you checked to make sure that the Outlook Address Book service is part of the mail profile?

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
 
Thank you Sue,

Sue Mosher said:
Let's clear up a couple of misconceptions here:

-- The Personal Address Book is a separate .pab file used in early versions of Outlook. It has nothing to do with the contacts stored on the
Exchange server, and it is highly unlikely that you're using it in Outlook 2003.
Click to expand...

Thank you.
-- The list of name suggestions is also not associated with the data on the Exchange server. It's stored in a separate .nk2 file associated with > the user's mail profile. From your description, it sounds possible that the file might be corrupt. You didn't create new user profiles on the > > > clients or new mail profiles, did you?
Click to expand...

No new user or mail profiles have been created.
This sounds like the heart of the problem, but you haven't given us much in the way of actual symptoms.

Could you describe what uses see in the address book dialog? Have you checked to make sure that the Outlook Address Book service is part of > the mail profile?
Click to expand...

When users open the Address book they can use the dropdown menu and peruse
the GAL. A little further down on the same dropdown menu, under Outlook
Address Book, there are suddenly no address lists availble where there were 4
or 5 at one point.

The address lists are still in the users Outlook Profile under "Contacts".
I want to avoid going to each desktop, enabling the address book service, and
then individually checking "Show this folder and an e-mail address book" for
3 shifts of users.

Why would this "service" vanish? The force disconnect during this weekends
power outage? Is there a way to re-enable this across the board?

Thank you,

Chris B
 
If the Address Book dialog is listing the Outlook Address Book, then the service is already present in the mail profile. However, it sounds like it has become corrupted, possibly due to the forced disconnect. To resolve the corruption, users will need to remove the Outlook Address Book service and then add it back to the profile. There is no supported way to do this with GPO or a script.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
 
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