Change offline address book details for Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail accounts

This feature requires you to use a Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, Exchange Server 2003, or Exchange Server 2007 account in Cached Exchange Mode. Most home and personal accounts do not use Microsoft Exchange.

The offline address book contains the properties of a user, such as e-mail addresses, that Microsoft Outlook requires to send an e-mail message and display information about the sender. By using an offline address book, Outlook does not have to connect to Microsoft Exchange to resolve names or open the records for each user. This reduces network traffic and improves performance.

The offline address book is a snapshot of information from the Global Address List (GAL). Therefore, not all the information in the GAL is available in the offline address book. The following information in the GAL is not available in the offline address book:

• Custom properties added by a server administrator, such as the employee ID of each employee.

• Organizational hierarchy.

• Group memberships.

Outlook must be able to access Exchange to obtain this information. Therefore, if you are in Cached Exchange Mode and if you are working online — that is, your connection status is Connected to Microsoft Exchange — Outlook uses both the offline address book and the GAL to provide a complete listing of user information. If you are in Cached Exchange Mode and your connection status is Disconnected, Trying to Connect, or Offline, you can see only the information that is in the offline address book.

You can choose whether to download the offline address book or not, and the amount of detail to download, by doing the following:

1. On the Tools menu, point to Send/Receive, point to Send/Receive Settings, and then click Define Send/Receive Groups.

   Keyboard shortcut  Ctrl+Alt+S

2. Select the Send/Receive group that includes your Exchange account.

3. Under Folder Options, select the Download offline address book check box.

4. Click Address Book Settings.

5. Under Information to download, click Full Details or No Details.

Note: If you are using Cached Exchange Mode, it is recommended that you download the full details of the offline address book. This reduces the number of times the Outlook window might become unresponsive as well as the number uneccesary connections to the Microsoft Windows Server Active Directory.

If Outlook is left running constantly in Cached Exchange Mode, it automatically updates the offline address book about once a day depending on updates on the server running Exchange.

The offline address book can vary in size from a few megabytes to hundreds of megabytes in uncompressed form. The following factors can affect the size of the offline address book:

• The usage of security certificates in your organization. They are the single largest contributor to the size of the offline address book.

• The number of users in Windows Server Active Directory Domain Services.

• The number of distribution groups in Windows Server Active Directory Domain Services.

• The information that your organization has added to Windows Server Active Directory Domain Services for each user and each distribution group. For example, some organizations populate the address properties for each user; others do not.

Outlook has the following safeguards to help protect your organization's network from excessive offline address book downloads:

• In the default configuration, Outlook will only attempt one full offline address book download in a 13-hour period. Each instance when Outlook receives a response from the server and can at least start the offline address book download is counted as a download attempt.

• In the default configuration, Outlook does not limit the number of attempts for differential updates. If a differential update fails, Outlook will retry the update after waiting for one hour.