General Information About GAL and OAB
Each Exchange domain has a Global Address List (GAL), Address List
(AL), and Offline Address Book (OAB). The GAL is compiled on-the-fly by
the Exchange server and is available for you as the "Global Address
List" in Outlook, as long as it is connected to server (online mode). As
soon as any changes are made to your organization, the GAL will reflect
this. An Organizations AL represents the same set of mail-enabled
objects as the organization's GAL, but is designated to provide the
address book service in cached mode. Each AL has a corresponding OAB
that holds all real data. The AL is not available for clients until the
corresponding OAB is downloaded. In cached mode, Outlook will show the
AL first in the Address Book window, by default.
Usually the OAB rebuild happens immediately after a change to contact information has been made through the control panel.
The rebuild process can take up to 5-10 minutes to complete depending
on the organization size. For our typical clients it takes less than a
minute. After the rebuild is completed, it could take up to 4 hours for
the new OAB to be propagated to all servers and be available for Outlook
clients (native Exchange 2007 OAB distribution mechanism). For Outlook
2003 clients, a new version of OAB is available immediately after a
rebuild in the system public folder (legacy OAB distribution). We
rebuild OABs every day at 6AM ET for organizations who made changes to
their users, contacts, or distribution lists during the previous 24-hour
period.
Update contact information for Users in the Global Address List
After logging into your control panel, click on Hosting. In the Exchange section click on Contacts.
From this section you can update and add any contacts that you want to
appear in your Global Address List either through Outlook or Outlook Web
Access.
Adding external email addresses in the Global Address List
After logging into your control panel, click on Hosting. In the Exchange section click on Contacts.
From this section you can update and add any contacts that you want to
appear in your Global Address List either through Outlook or Outlook Web
Access.
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