Force download of Communicator 2007 R2 Address Book

I have been troubleshooting address book issues recently and thought I would blog about a common question from my customers.

As administrators it can be useful, when troubleshooting, to download a new copy of the address book to a client. This is done by deleting the GALContacts.db file from a particular users profile
%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Communicator\sip_
In the initial release of Microsoft Office Communicator R2, the GALContacts.db file was recreated immediately when the user logged back in to the client.
Microsoft found that this could cause network performance issues if a large number of clients were enabled or started up at the same time or network bandwidth is limited.
This article was created for it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972403

The July 2009 Microsoft Office Communicator patch changed the behaviour of the download to offset it between 0 and 60 minutes to work around this potential bottleneck.

This fix provides administrators with a dilemma, as when troubleshooting it could take up to 60 minutes to see the address book start downloading.

This offset can be controlled via the following registry DWORD:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator\GalDownloadInitialDelay

If this DWORD value is set to '0', the address book download will start immediately after sign-in.
If this registry value is not set, the default value is a random offset between 0 and 60 minutes.

For additional information please refer to the Microsoft KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972403

This workaround should only be used for troubleshooting purposes and it is recommended that the DWORD is removed during normal operations so as not to place any unnecessary load on the infrastructure.

Backups should always be taken when modifying the registry.