Tin Cups and String: The Convergent Microsoft UC Blog

Nothing overly special about this command and it’s been out there in several places.  The problem is I can never find it when I need it.  Why would you need it?  Let’s say you made a change to the address normalization file and the next morning that one really important person wanted to make a phone call but the normalization file had not yet updated.  But why, you logged in and out as the user and it still didn’t update.  MOC by default picks a random time between 0 to 60 minutes for initial delay of downloading the address book.  I’m sure this is to prevent the server from being overrun with requests in the morning.  Bad thing is for a phone system, this can be problematic at times.  So the following forces an updated galcontacts.db file.

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator
   (you may have to created the Communicator key if it’s not there)
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. In the New Value #1 dialog box, type GalDownloadInitialDelay, and then press the ENTER key.
5. Right-click the GalDownloadInitialDelay registry entry, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
   • If you set the value as 0, the address book download will take effect immediately after sign-in.
   • If you do not set this registry value, the default value is random value between 0 and 60 minutes. Therefore, the delay is random a random value between 0 and 60 minutes.
   • Exit Registry Editor.

(This is a reprint of something I would once long ago and have sitting in my OneNote.  If I find the URL I will give credit to where I found it.  Might have even been TechNet.)

Now if you go and delete the galcontacts.db and .db.idx file from c:\users\<username>\appdata\microsoft\communicator\sip_<username>@domain.com\ and log out and in of communicator this will force the address book to download again.  Kinda handy in testing scenarios and when you simply don’t want to wait.  (If you are an XP user your path is c:\documents and settings\<username>\Application Data\Local Settings\Microsoft\Communicator\sip_<username>@domain.com\galcontacts.db)

<yep - found it here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972403 - the technet article is about how to prevent too much bandwidth from being used>