Solve offline address-book woes

Users who work offline will have a locally retained copy of their address book to allow address lookups when they're not connected to the Exchange server. Under certain circumstances, the server components that generate the offline address book (known as OABGen) may stop working.

When this happens, Exchange users will find themselves confronted with an error, such as:

Task 'Microsoft Exchange Server' reported error
(0x8004010F) : 'The operation failed. An object could not
be found.'

Additionally, the Microsoft Outlook Synchronization.log file may contain the entry "0x8004010f (MAPI_E_NOTFOUND)."

The only solution in this situation is to reset the system site folders, which is unfortunately a destructive process -- it will cause any data in the site folders to be lost, so that data should be backed up before proceeding.

1. Run the GUIDGEN.EXE utility, found in the SUPPORTUTILSI386 folder on the Exchange 2000 CD.

2. Under GUID Format, select Registry Format and generate a new GUID, or Globally Unique Identifier. This number will be used to rebuild the site folders.

3. Copy the GUID to Notepad or another text editor, quit GUIDGEN.EXE, and remove all brackets and hyphens from the GUID. Rewrite the GUID so that each pair of numbers has a "0x" and a space in front of it, so that "3bc1d48f..." would read "0x3b 0xc1 0xd4 0x8f..."

4. Open the ADSI Editor (Adsiedit.msc). This is supplied with the Windows 2000 Resource Kit, but can be downloaded separately from www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/default.asp.

5. Drill down through the following: Configuration Container | Configuration, DC=<Your Domain Controller> | Services | Microsoft Exchange | <Name of Organization> | Adminstrative Groups | <Name of Admin Group>. Each of these is prefixed with a "CN=".

6. Open the Properties page for your admin group and select Attributes. Under Select A Property To View, select SiteFolderGuid. In Edit Attribute, paste in the new GUID you generated and reformatted, and click Set, then OK.

7. Quit ADSI Editor and stop and restart the Exchange service (or reboot).

Serdar Yegulalp is the editor of the Windows 2000 Power Users Newsletter.