Lync Address Book Service

The Lync Address Book service provides offline and online address book services to Lync clients. The Address Book service runs on a Front End server, usually the first server in the pool. Lync will manage a failed Address Book service by bringing the service online on an alternate Front End server. The AB service also provides Distribution Group expansion and Phone number Normalisation. In Lync 2010, the traditional offline Address Book has been supplemented by an Address Book Web Query.

 
The Lync 2010 (and Office Communicator 2007 & R2) clients will use the AB file download if available, while the Phone Edition, Mobile client and Web App will prefer the Web Query if available.

 
The handling of phone number Normalisation has been modified in Lync Server 2010. Phone numbers are now pre-screened to remove white space and non-mandatory characters before the phone numbers from AD are normalised. This makes the configuration of Address book normalisation rules simpler but does mean that rules carried over from OCS implementations may not function correctly.

 
The Address Book service will extract data from AD and import the data into the RTCab and RTCab1 databases on the Lync SQL server. The RTCab and RTCab1 databases are rotated on a daily basis to allow querying of a database while the alternate database is being updated. The database holds a table, AbAttribute, which controls which AD fields will be populated into the Address Book database and files.


 
Address Book Server Powershell Cmdlets

You cannot configure the Address Book Server settings in Lync Server Control Panel. Windows PowerShell is the primary tool for managing these settings. The following is a list of cmdlets that relate directly to managing the Address Book Server:

Address Book Server

There is a default Address book configuration created at install time at the Global level. You can create new Address Book configuration settings at the site level and all servers in that site will adhere to the site level configuration. There are Powershell cmdlets to retrieve an existing set of configuration parameters, create a new set, delete a set (except the Global configuration set) and modify parameters within a configuration set.

• Get-CsAddressBookConfiguration
  
• New-CsAddressBookConfiguration
  
• Remove-CsAddressBookConfiguration
  
• Set-CsAddressBookConfiguration
  

• Update-CsAddressBook  
• Forces the specified Address Book servers to synchronize their contents with the User database.
  
• Test-CsAddressBookService
  
• Tests the ability of a user to access the server that hosts the Address Book Download Web service.
  
  
  
• Test-CsAddressBookWebQuery
• Tests the ability of a user to search for, and return, information from the Address Book by using the Address Book Web Query service.
  
   The ABSConfig.exe utility from the Lync Resource Kit is used to configure which data is imported into the AB database from AD. It function is to 
• To enable administrators to map attributes in Active Directory Domain Services to the attributes for Lync Server.
• To enable administrators to specify the Active Directory attribute to be included or excluded in the Address Book Service files.
• To enable administrators to restore default Address Book Service settings.

The PS cmdlet Get-CsUserReplicatorConfiguration shows the interval between changes in AD and updates to the Lync AD database. The Get-CsAddressBookConfiguration cmdlet shows the time of day when the Lync AB database is exported to the Address Book data files and also shows the possible delay for the Address Book service to respond to the Update-CSAddressBook. The Update-CSUserDatabase will force the extract of AD data into the Lync AB database.

Jeff Guillet has published a batch file to force the download of the latest Address Book.