Managing the Address Book Server from the Command Line

You can manage the Address Book Server by running ABServer.exe from a command prompt. You can modify the environment path system variable to include the location of ABServer.exe (%programfiles%\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\Server\Core), or you can run the tool directly from the Office Communications Server Address Book directory.

The following table shows valid command switches and arguments.

Table 1. ABServer.exe Command Switches and Arguments

Command switch	Arguments	Description
-? /?	None	Displays all command switches for ABServer.exe.
-syncNow	None	Manually synchronizes the Address Book Server by pausing the service to perform synchronization and then restarting the service. If you are in a failover scenario and failing over from one server to another, and if -syncNow does not work, check the load-balancer settings. The health monitor for incoming port 135 should point to port 5060 (or 5061) on the servers. By default, it points to port 135 on the servers. Because port 135 is always up when the computer is running, the server remains marked as being up even if the Office Communications Server Front End service is down.
-regenUR	None	Forces user replication regeneration.
-dumpFile input-file [output-file]	input-file [output-file]	Dumps the input file given as the first argument, formatted as text, to the output file given as the second argument. If the second argument is not given, the output file name defaults to the same path and file name as the input file with a .txt extension appended.
-testPhoneNorm	phone-number	Loads the normalization rules text file and attempts to normalize the phone number arguments. The results are displayed in the command-line shell. If the phone number argument contains spaces, the phone number must be enclosed in quotation marks (" ").
-validateDB	None	Validates that the RTCAb database is available and provides a report of database attributes and invalid phone numbers. If the Address Book Server PartitionByOU WMI property is set to TRUE, OU paths are included in the report.
-dumpRules	None	Displays all rules currently in effect, including generic and company rules.