How to make a name change in Exchange 2007

I’ve been asked this several times of people not knowing how to make changes when either the person’s name was misspelled or the person’s name is changed do to something like a marriage or divorce.

1. Open up the Microsoft Exchange Console.
2. Find the user you are wanting to make the changes to.
3. Right Click the user and select properties.
4. go to the General tab and change the name.
5. Go to “User Information” tab and make sure each line is correct
6. Go to “Email Addresses” tab. Make sure both the SMTP and X400 lines are correct. Normally exchange leaves the old X400 address lying around. I always remove it.

Now that these changes have taken place you might think to yourself. I’m going to test this out! You open outlook and check to see if the Global Address list has been updated. You look and it hasn’t!

The reason for this is Exchange caches the Global Address via the Offline Address Book so that the system feels extremely quick. This caching however is not your friend when you want to see the changes right away. First thing you will need to do is:

1. Make sure you still have the Microsoft Exchange Console open. If it is not open please open it again.
2. There will be 3 types of configurations on the left hand side of the console. You want to click on Organization configuration
3. Under Organization configuration there will be Mailbox. Click on that.
4. Once you Click on Mailbox, in the main area of the Console you will see 5 tabs. The last one should be “Offline Address Book”. Click it.
5. Most people will only see “Default Offline Address Book”.
6. Right Click and select update.
7. This will force Exchange to get all that data you entered in the first few steps added to the Global Address Book cache.

You are now officially done with working with exchange. If people are still complaining about not seeing the right name you will need to get them to download the most up to date Offline Address book. Again since the client caches the Offline Address Book you will need to make sure the client has the most up to date version. (Note – I really don’t know how long a client will take to get the newer Global Address list. Some clients seem to get it within an hour while others seem to take up to a couple of days)

To update the Global Address list on the machines:

1. Open Outlook 2003/2007
2. Click on Options
3. Click Send/Receive
4. Click on Download Address Book…

Below are some of the screenshots from the steps above.

Make sure this is all filled in with the correct info.

This shows how to update the Offline Address Book.

Shows how to get Outlook Client to download the latest Offline Address Book.