In Today's post I am going over a nice feature that is not used a lot in most of the customers that I worked with which is the Global web Distribution for OAB.
In the default OAB we will see something like this for the Default Offline Address Book. In a normal situation we would go there and enable the Web-based distribution and add the servers which is totally fine when you have a few servers and you don't change a lot.
However let's think for a moment in environment with lots of sites where all sites have Exchange Servers, or in multi-tenancy environment where several servers are added/removed in a monthly basis. For our environment, once we tried to add new server, it takes forever to get our server list
The automatic solution!
There is a neat solution called GlobalWebDistributionEnabled on each Offline Address Book. What this feature does is that configures automatic any new CAS server to receive the OAB which is great. If you want to do that
In order to get the information about any given OAB we can run the following cmdlet:
Get-OfflineAddressBook | Select Name,Version,AddressLists,Global* | fl
Cool, eh? If you want to enable that we just need to run the following cmdlet
Set-OfflineAddressBook –Identity '\Default Offline Address Book' –GlobalWebDistributionEnabled $True
Now if an administrator goes there to try to add something that is going to be the message that you won't able to add the server since you have GlobalWebDistributionEnabled.
Note: The Public folder distribution method is not impacted by this procedure so it's up to you whether you enable or not such feature.
