Outlook cache

[Billybonga]

Our company has a number of laptop users who occasionaly connect to our domain (mainly they are on the road).

Their Outlook profiles are set with cache enabled (to allow for offline viewing of their emails) but what we have noticed is that when the user plugs their laptop into the network they don't receive any new updates from the Global Address book.

This means that any new entries to the address book that had been made since they last synced thier account does not get transfered.

We have a work-around of going into their profile and disabling cache mode, then exiting out of Outlook, going back in and enabling cache mode.

What i would like to do is create a small application that they can click at their own convenience that will disable/enable the cache mode and get the most recent copy of Global Address book. Because of the large size of our Global address book we don't want this sync to run upon every-login - just when the user clicks the application/script.

Any help, thoughts, ideas on how to achieve this would be greatfully welcome.

 

[Billybonga]

P.S. It is Outlook 2003 running on Windows XP Pro

I read that setting the reg key : HKEY_CURRENT_USERS\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Cached Mode to 0 will disable Cache Mode but I am unable to locate this registry key ??

 

[Billybonga]

OK ... I found the following registry hack :
You can use the following registry value to enable or disable Cached
Exchange mode:

Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows
Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\<ProfileName>\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a

Value name: 00036601
Value type: REG_BINARY
Values: 94 01 00 00 (enabled), 14 00 00 00 (disabled)

You can use the Custom Maintenance Wizard to deploy this change.


Now this works when manually done ... so what i would like to do is create a small VB aplication that when run will disable/enable this key - the big problem is see here is the <Profile> setting as the profile will vary depending on the account/laptop user ??

Any ideas how to overcome this ?

 

[strongm]

Have you confirmed that the issue is not being caused by how often the OAB is updated on your Exchange Server?

 

[Billybonga]

Hi strongm

yes we have - but even that wouldn't make much difference as users may be off-site for weeks and then only call into the office for a couple of hours to plug in.

Having an icon on their desktop that will allow them to re-sync their Global Address List would allow them to decide when they require updates as they only need to perform updates after a new user has been added ... again which can vary but all users do receive an email advising of new starts