I’ve never really hit it off with the OCS and Lync Address Book. I don’t know I did, but the ABS took a dislike to me long ago that remains to this day.
In the process of chasing some Lync ABS strangeness (like where a contact and their details are present in an “Abserver.exe –dumpfile”, but refuse to offer themselves to a user) I found several posts that blamed my now estranged friend ABSConfig.exe. (Refer my earlier blog post on the subject, and other tales of woe from the Dr Rez site).
The suggested fix for random ABS strangeness is to connect to the Front-End’s RTC Database from the SQL Management Studio and refresh the config.
OK, so first off you need to download the Management Studio, as this isn’t installed by default with the Standard Edition’s SQL Express. Duly done, when I went to install it I received this disconcerting pop-up “Program Compatibility Assistant / This program has known compatibility issues”:
I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of upgrading SQL on the Front-End – I figured a Lync update would do that when it’s good and ready – so instead opted for plan B: I used this as an excuse to build another SQL machine (which I’d been putting off), and then accessed the FE from the Management Studio on that machine.
This permitted me to run the necessary refresh, but alas, my ABS is still not delivering the goods as expected.
Back to the ol’ drawing board, as they say.
I later found this article on TechNet with a note that’d clearly been written for me:
Lync Server 2010 automatically installs SQL Server 2008 Express on each Standard Edition server and each Lync Server 2010 server on which the local configuration store is located. After deploying the servers, you can upgrade the RTC database on the Standard Edition server and the RTCLocal databases on other server roles to SQL Server 2008 R2 Express by running the SQL Server 2008 R2 Express setup wizard and selecting the upgrade option. Repeat this process for each RTC and RTCLocal database.
(Oh, and with a bit of help I even managed to nail the ABS issue as well. You can read about that here).
– G.
