Fun with Outlook Address books; Cisco looking for a fight.

I'm having fun with Outlook Address Books this morning. A couple of weeks ago I built and introduced an Exchange 2007 server, looking towards migrating our accounts over from Exchange 2003. I created connectors between the two servers, and they're seeing each other fine. I pulled over a test mailbox, which seemed to go smoothly although I haven't been able to fully check that out yet because I need to update the ACL's on our PIX firewalls to include the new server.

So far, so good, until it was pointed out to me that somehow, mysteriously, the behaviour of my users address books in Outlook has changed. One set of users defaulted to one address list, another to another - both stored below the Global Address list. Now, those lists aren't visible from outlook, even though they both still work as email distribution lists. Confused yet? I am.

So I've populated two address lists above the GAL and they work fine, only problem being I haven't yet sussed if I can push our users to these via Group Policy, which would be ideal. So for now, the helpdesk are going to have to sort it - if someone complains, which as yet, they haven't. I know they will though, and probably before I fix it.

On another note, it looks as though Cisco are wading into the Blade-Server market. Coming hot on the heels of news that they're planning on wading into the virtualization market too, and in the face of HP's switch/routing challenge in the shape of Procurve, it's beginning to look more than a little like the day when KFC peddled their first burger and Ronald McDonald deep-fried his first chicken bollock. Hopefully, like that happy day, this ends up as good news for the customer, but with no sickly aftertaste, clogged arteries, or lingering sense of guilt attached.