How Communicator Client Communicate with Address Book Server?

While working as OCS administrator, we must know the communicator client and Address server communication.

Here are the useful information regarding Address Book Server.

The Address Book URLs (that is, one internal and one external) are the paths that clients use to access the data files in the Address Book Server file store. These URLs are configured under the Address Book tab in the Web Components Properties for the given Standard Edition server or Enterprise pool, and are retrieved through in-band provisioning (absInternalServerUrl and absExternalServerUrl) by the client when it logs on to its Standard Edition server or Enterprise pool. The clients can also have these URLs configured through Group Policy Objects.

Communicator client- > Address book Services

Active Directory -> User Replicator -> Database -> Address Book Services -> File Store (NTFS) – IIS 6.0 Server.

Edit Page option Grayed out or Missing

Issue:

Edit Page option is missing / grayed out

Troubleshooting

• This may be because of some other user checked out the page for editing and we get GRAYED OUT “Edit Page” option
• IF you are an admin or owner of the site and if you want it back go to Page > Override Check Out
• If the option is missing, how to get it back ?
• At the line end (URL end) type ToolPaneView=2 or ??ToolPaneView=2 

Cannot connect to the server at this time. Changes to your data cannot be saved Export to Spreadsheet

One of my colleague reported an issue with  “Export to Spreadsheet” in Sharepoint 2007 list. He was the only one who was getting this error message. So this was sure that this was a machine specific issue and has to do something with the IE settings.

When he clicked on one of the list it says “Cannot connect to the server at this time. Changes to your data cannot be saved” and at the same time i was able to get this working.

After some troubleshooting we found that,  when the SharePoint site had been accessed from Vista/Win7 clients with SSL (https) and with the local user account. Turned out that the problem was related to certificate revocation lists (CRLs) and had been an issue due to the following setting in IE: “Check for server certificate revocation” which is switched on by-default on Vista/Win7 clients as opposed to XP clients. When this IE switch got turned off, everything was working fine.