Remove Offline Address Book in Exchange Server

You like to remove an Offline Address Book (OAB) in Exchange Server. The only way to do this is with PowerShell. In this article, you learn how to remove the Offline Address Book in Exchange Server with PowerShell.

Get Offline Address Book

Let’s first get all the OABs in the organization. Run Exchange Management Shell as administrator. Run the Get-OfflineAddressBook cmdlet.

Get-OfflineAddressBook

In our example, the output shows a default offline address book and two other offline address books.

Name                         Versions   AddressLists
----                         --------   ------------
Default Offline Address Book {Version4} {\Default Global Address List}
OAB_London                   {Version4} {\Default Global Address List}
OAB_NewYork                  {Version4} {\Default Global Address List}

Let’s look at how to delete an Offline Address Book with PowerShell.

Remove Offline Address Book

We like to remove the Offline Address Book with the name OAB_London. Run the Remove-OfflineAddressBook cmdlet and confirm with Y.

Remove-OfflineAddressBook "OAB_London" -Confirm:$false

Update Offline Address Book

It’s essential to run the Update-OfflineAddressBook cmdlet so the changes will apply instantly instead of waiting for a maximum of 8 hours.

Note: The Offline Address Book (OAB) automatically updates every 8 hours on the Exchange Server. The Outlook clients automatically update every 24 hours.

Get-OfflineAddressBook | Update-OfflineAddressBook

That’s it!

Read more: Remove last Exchange Server in organization »

Conclusion

You learned how to remove the Offline Address Book in Exchange Server. The only way to delete the Offline Address Book is with PowerShell. First, get the Offline Address Book name that you want to remove. Next, remove the Offline Address Book. As of last, update the Offline Address Book.

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