GAL/Address Lists

Facebook, Welcome to Microsoft Outlook

When the Outlook team launched the Outlook Social Connector for Outlook 2010, LinkedIn and MySpace were the only 2 social network providers supported. Like most users my first reaction was “What about Facebook?” The Outlook Social Connector is a great addition to Outlook, but the lack of Facebook— without a doubt the most popular social […]

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Modifying Display Templates and additional attributes

Recently got a question about customizing the GAL and my previous post that talks about it: “HOW TO: Modify Display Template to make default email address appear in Address Book/GAL“. In Exchange 2010/2007, the new Details Template Editor can be found in EMC | Tools. The editor makes it much easier to modify templates and […]

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HOW TO: Hide Distribution Group membership

Exchange Server 2003’s extensions for Active Directory Users & Computers console made hiding a Distribution Group’s membership a trivial task, accomplished by right-clicking a group, selecting Exchange Tasks and selecting Hide Membership. Figure 1: The Exchange Tasks wizard in ADUC provides an option to hide Distribution Group membership in Exchange Server 2003 As the task […]

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OPATH: Filterable properties that can be used in Recipient Filters

Exchange 2007 uses OPATH filters to filter recipients for things like Email Address Policies and Query-based Distribution Groups. Earlier I’d written about my adventures and annoyances with Exchange’s OPATH filters and the recently added support for memberOf attribute in OPATH filters. Exchange 2007 and later use OPATH filters for filtering recipients in Address Books/GAL, Email […]

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memberOf Attribute can now be used in OPATH filters!

I’ve blogged about OPATH filters before [read previous post “Adventures with OPATH: some annoyances if you’re used to LDAP“], and one of the annoyances was the the fact that it wasn’t possible to use the memberOf attribute to pick up (or exclude) members of certain groups from all the stuff that uses OPATH filters such […]

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Offline Address Book: Mystery of The Missing Recipients

Frequently users report recipients missing from the GAL. So begins the mystery of missing recipients. These are existing users, not new ones. New users don’t show up in the GAL for clients using Outlook 2003 Cached Mode clients, because Outlook uses an Offline Address List (aka “Offline Address Book” or OAB), which is generated once […]

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Adventures with OPATH filters in Exchange 2007 and some annoyances if you’re used to LDAP

If you’ve deployed or have been testing Exchange Server 2007, you must have certainly crossed paths with OPATH. OPATH is a querying language, somewhat similar to SQL. It is used to filter objects in PowerShell. OPATH filters replace the LDAP filters for EmailAddressPolicies (equivalent of Recipient Policies), Address Lists/GAL, and Dynamic Distribution Groups (aka “Query-Based […]

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Update – HOW TO: Find an email address in Active Directory

SKIP THIS POST and head over to Five and a half ways to find an email address in Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, a comprehensive post that shows all the ways you can find an email address in Active Directory.  (OK, if you must really know, we merged content from this post with a previous […]

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HOW TO: Modify Display Template to make default email address appear in Address Book/GAL

This was an interesting question posed in exchange.admin today, and it’s been a long while since I made such changes so it took a while to figure this out. When you go to a recipient’s properties in GAL/Address Book in Outlook, the (default) email address – something you want to find quickly and many a […]

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All Groups address list and Query-Based Distribution Groups

You create new Query-Based Distribution Groups but they don’t show up in the All Groups address list in Outlook clients – cached mode or not. QBDGs are not really groups, as far as Active Directory goes. They’re instantiated from a new class – msExchDynamicDistributionList. The default ldap filter for All Groups address list, stored in […]

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