Offline Address Book Replication Does Not Work After You Upgrade to Exchange Server 2003

When you upgrade Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server to Exchange Server 2003, offline Address Book replication between your servers may no longer work as you expect.

This behavior occurs because the offline Address Book component in Exchange Server 2003 has new code to support offline Address Books that are in Unicode. This code creates a new folder named OAB Version 3a that does not have replica information entered.

Because of this, if you already manually configured replication information for the OAB Version 2 folder in Exchange 2000, you must enter that replication information for the new OAB Version 3a folder after you upgrade to Exchange Server 2003.

To work around this behavior, manually enter the offline Address Book replication information for the new folder. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Start Exchange System Manager.
2. If administrative groups are enabled, expand Administrative Groups, and then expand First Administrative Group, where First Administrative Group is the administrative group that contains the server that you want to configure offline Address Book replication on.
3. Expand Folders, right-click Public Folders, and then click View System Folders.
4. Expand Public Folders, expand OFFLINE ADDRESS BOOK, and then expand the container that contains the offline Address Book that you want to configure replication for.
   
   For example, expand /o=First Organization/cn=addrlists/cn=oabs/cn=Default Offline Address List.
5. Right-click OAB Version 2, and then click Properties.
6. Click the Replication tab, and then note the replication schedule and public store information.
7. Click OK.
8. Right-click OAB Version 3a, and then click Properties.
9. Click the Replication tab, and then configure the replication schedule and public store information.
10. Repeat these steps to configure offline Address Book replication on each Exchange Server 2003 computer.

This behavior is by design.

For additional information about how to manage offline address lists in Exchange 2003, search Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Help for the following topic: managing offline address lists.