Automatic Import of PAB's

[John Louden via OfficeKB.com]

Hi All,

We are currently migrating our environment from Outlook 97\Exchange 5.5 to Outlook 2003\Exchange 2003.

The users are used to working with PAB's, however we are trying to get them to import their PAB's to contacts. I have been tasked with find a way to auomate this task so the users don't have a say in the matter.

The office custom Wizard and GPO's don't have the ability to do this nor does the PRF method. Does Anyone know of any tools that we can run. I'm just trying to avoid writing some script to do this.

Regards
John

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Screen 21 of the Custom Installation Wizard or Screen 16 of the Custom
Maintenance Wizard offers the option to convert a PAB. Enabling that option
causes a REG_SZ registry value named ImportPAB to be written to the
HKCU\SOftware\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Setup with the value "yes". When
Outlook first runs, it should import the PAB. (CMW also sets to zero two
registry values named FirstRun and First-Run -- you can get the details from
the CMW file viewer.)

I'm pretty sure, though, that you can't use this technique if you're
instituting a new mail profile. How would Outlook know what .pab to convert
in that case? But that shouldn't be any problem, since you're using the same
mail account, just probably changing server names.

You may wind up doing this in a couple of stages, with the details depending
on whether you're doing the Outlook rollout or the Exchange migration first.
I'll try to do some testing and report back.