Offline Address Book - OALGen Error

I take my hat off to Microsoft for making life so easy. I mean compare the number of commands you have to type on those command line *ix machines (before you start replying saying that *ix is no longer command line but GUI, I should make my statement more coherent by saying that I am referring to those distros about 10 years back) to get a task done with the number of clicks you would do for the same on a Windows box.

But at times Microsoft can be quite dumb as well, especially when it comes to support. The error codes generated can be so misleading that even the best techie can on the first try be taken on a path miles away from the solution. But then again I should not complain because the more time I spend finding the solution, the more money I make :)

I recently was faced with an issue with Offline Address Book generation. I kept getting the following error

OALGen will skip user entry 'user name' in address list '\Global Address List' because the SMTP address '' is invalid


I did some searching on google and found the following article on support.microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926206 but the solution outlined there didnt help much.

I finally found another article that explained what the problem was. The user that was causing OALGen to spit the errors had about 5 email addresses attached to his account. Now if you look under the General tab of the user account in Active Directory, you will see that there is an email address listed there. Now what had happened is that that email address was not the same as the primary email address, and because of that OALGen kept on bombing out. I changed the address in the General tab, ran an update on OAL and presto, all was good.

For those of you interested in the article that came to my rescue, here is the link http://exchangepedia.com/blog/2007/02/offline-address-book-mystery-of-missing.html

Have a lovely week.