Automate Import of Personal Address Book and Remove Service from Outlook 2003 Profile

[kitesurfingken]

We have 600 users who have a PAB in their Outlook profile. We are
trying to find a way to automate the import of the PAB contents into
Outlook Contacts and remove the service from the Outlook profile
(without user intervention).
When you upgrade to a new version of Outlook it offers to do this for
you, but we are not planning any version upgrades anytime soon.
Is there a way to trigger this same functionality so that we can
eliminate PABs after importing their contents?
We are not interested in providing instructions to the users, we want
to do this behind the scenes without having to involve them in the
process.
Registry searches indicate the PAB entry is stored in a key similoar
to:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook
\9b8f6dc7d6febe48bc6cd5b8509ba567]
Where "Outlook" is the name of the user's profile. The problem is, the
string that follows the profile name is unique to each user.
We want to avoid overwriting other settings in the user's profile so
using a custom PRF file is out.
Thanks for any an all suggestions,
Ken

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Automatic import of a PAB file that already exists in the user's mail profile can be trigered by this registry setting:

Key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Setup
Value: ImportPAB (REG_SZ)
Data: yes

Yes, strangely, it's a string value.

You can deploy that setting with the Custom Maintenance Wizard, at the top of screen 16.

 

[kitesurfingken]

Automatic import of a PAB file that already exists in the user's mail profile can be trigered by this registry setting:

Key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Setup
Value: ImportPAB (REG_SZ)
Data: yes

Yes, strangely, it's a string value.

You can deploy that setting with the Custom Maintenance Wizard, at the top of screen 16.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54

We have 600 users who have a PAB in their Outlook profile. We are
trying to find a way to automate the import of the PAB contents into
Outlook Contacts and remove the service from the Outlook profile
(without user intervention).
When you upgrade to a new version of Outlook it offers to do this for
you, but we are not planning any version upgrades anytime soon.
Is there a way to trigger this same functionality so that we can
eliminate PABs after importing their contents?
We are not interested in providing instructions to the users, we want
to do this behind the scenes without having to involve them in the
process.
Registry searches indicate the PAB entry is stored in a key similoar
to:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook
\9b8f6dc7d6febe48bc6cd5b8509ba567]
Where "Outlook" is the name of the user's profile. The problem is, the
string that follows the profile name is unique to each user.
We want to avoid overwriting other settings in the user's profile so
using a custom PRF file is out.
Thanks for any an all suggestions,
Ken- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thank you for the fast reply.
The good news, using the Custom Maintenance Wizard does exactly what
we want, thanks for the tip.

I also tried to change the ImportPAB value to "yes" with using the
CMW, but it did not trigger the import process.
I checked the registry key after running the CMW and it had set it to
"yes".
The CMW also removed the service once the import was complete which is
what we wanted.
Thanks so much,
Ken

 

[kitesurfingken]

Automatic import of a PAB file that already exists in the user's mail profile can be trigered by this registry setting:

Key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Setup
Value: ImportPAB (REG_SZ)
Data: yes

Yes, strangely, it's a string value.

You can deploy that setting with the Custom Maintenance Wizard, at the top of screen 16.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54

We have 600 users who have a PAB in their Outlook profile. We are
trying to find a way to automate the import of the PAB contents into
Outlook Contacts and remove the service from the Outlook profile
(without user intervention).
When you upgrade to a new version of Outlook it offers to do this for
you, but we are not planning any version upgrades anytime soon.
Is there a way to trigger this same functionality so that we can
eliminate PABs after importing their contents?
We are not interested in providing instructions to the users, we want
to do this behind the scenes without having to involve them in the
process.
Registry searches indicate the PAB entry is stored in a key similoar
to:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook
\9b8f6dc7d6febe48bc6cd5b8509ba567]
Where "Outlook" is the name of the user's profile. The problem is, the
string that follows the profile name is unique to each user.
We want to avoid overwriting other settings in the user's profile so
using a custom PRF file is out.
Thanks for any an all suggestions,
Ken- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thank you for the fast reply.
The good news, using the Custom Maintenance Wizard does exactly what
we want, thanks for the tip.

I also tried to change the ImportPAB value to "yes" with using the
CMW, but it did not trigger the import process.
I checked the registry key after running the CMW and it had set it to
"yes".
The CMW also removed the service once the import was complete which is
what we wanted.
Thanks so much,
Ken- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

The first line in my second paragraph should read, "without using the
CMW" not "with using the CMW".
It works as expected when using the CMW, but not when manually editing
the registry key.
Ken

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

There's probably another registry value involved, then, that I missed when I was testing this a few years ago.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54

Automatic import of a PAB file that already exists in the user's mail profile can be trigered by this registry setting:

Key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Setup
Value: ImportPAB (REG_SZ)
Data: yes

Yes, strangely, it's a string value.

You can deploy that setting with the Custom Maintenance Wizard, at the top of screen 16.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54

We have 600 users who have a PAB in their Outlook profile. We are
trying to find a way to automate the import of the PAB contents into
Outlook Contacts and remove the service from the Outlook profile
(without user intervention).
When you upgrade to a new version of Outlook it offers to do this for
you, but we are not planning any version upgrades anytime soon.
Is there a way to trigger this same functionality so that we can
eliminate PABs after importing their contents?
We are not interested in providing instructions to the users, we want
to do this behind the scenes without having to involve them in the
process.
Registry searches indicate the PAB entry is stored in a key similoar
to:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook
\9b8f6dc7d6febe48bc6cd5b8509ba567]
Where "Outlook" is the name of the user's profile. The problem is, the
string that follows the profile name is unique to each user.
We want to avoid overwriting other settings in the user's profile so
using a custom PRF file is out.
Thanks for any an all suggestions,
Ken- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thank you for the fast reply.
The good news, using the Custom Maintenance Wizard does exactly what
we want, thanks for the tip.

I also tried to change the ImportPAB value to "yes" with using the
CMW, but it did not trigger the import process.
I checked the registry key after running the CMW and it had set it to
"yes".
The CMW also removed the service once the import was complete which is
what we wanted.
Thanks so much,
Ken- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

The first line in my second paragraph should read, "without using the
CMW" not "with using the CMW".
It works as expected when using the CMW, but not when manually editing
the registry key.
Ken