Outlook 2000 and LDAP Address Book

[antonmb]

We recently migrated from Exchange to Zimbra. One of the initial concerns were the loss of the Global Address Book from Exchange. To solve this, we were able to add the Microsoft LDAP service from Outlook and put in the mail store information of Zimbra, and it works well -- two issues however:

1. The contacts only appear after you try to search for users with an empty query. From here, Outlook returns an error on an LDAP search limit and returns a list of users. The users aren't automatically shown on the list when you click on "To:" during mail composition -- you will need to do a search query before the list gets populated.

2. During a blank search, it complains of a search limit on the LDAP server. How do we remove this limit?

Thanks!

[antonmb]

Shameless bump.

[soxfan]

I'll take a shot at answering. First, a couple of questions I would ask are: How are you using Outlook 2000 with Zimbra (Outlook connector, POP3, IMAP)?; and What mode do you have Outlook 2000 running in (Corporate/Workgroup or Internet only)? From your description of setting up a Microsoft LDAP service I would guess that you are in Corporate/Workgroup mode and are doing POP3 with Zimbra. If this is the case I would ask if there is any reason you can't go to Internet only mode. The only reason I say this is that I think you have a little more flexibility with setting up LDAP when in this mode.

Anyway, I think what you described with names not showing up until you do a search, etc. are things you will have to live with. One thing that may help though is that address auto-completion should work with the LDAP address book. So, if you type the name John in the "To:" field and there is only one person named John in the LDAP directory Outlook will automatically fill out the complete name and have a good email address. If there are multiple people named John in the directory Outlook will put a "squiggly" red underline beneath the name. You can then right-click on the name and Outlook will display the possible matches and allow you to pick the right one.

As far as the search limit, I believe in Corporate/Workgroup mode Outlook defaults to 100 names that it will return. They do not give you any options on the service for changing this number. I remember way back when I setup Outlook 2000 with an OpenLDAP address book finding a registry key that could be adjusted to bump up the number. However, I just looked around and couldn't come up with it. Note that in Internet only mode there is a setting for the maximum number of results that will be shown for a search. This is one of the reasons I recommended the switch.

Hope this helps.

[antonmb]

Hi sox,

We're currently running Internet mode. I've found the registry entry on one machine. However, modifying the registry entries of each computer in the network manually is just a bit too much at the moment; since the registry entries in the profile is unique for each machine, it's not exactly something I can deploy on the Samba server as a login script.

As for the auto-completion, is there a special setting that needs to be turned on for this to work? It's currently not working on the client machines. Eg: on the webclient you need to turn on the autocompletion in GAL option.


Thanks for the reply.

[soxfan]

Hmm, are you sure you are in Internet mode? The reason I ask is because you mention setting up a Microsoft LDAP service and that's the wording under Corporate/Workgroup mode. When you are in Internet mode you go under Tools --> Accounts and setup a Directory Service. If you are in Internet mode both the settings for address auto-completion and the number of search results to return are under the Properties on the Directory Service; the address auto-completion on the General tab and the search results under the Advanced tab.