Hi I have been reading the following article here, entitled "Getting Exchange MAPI's GC-Reconnect stuff to work" http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonjoh/archive/2004/12/21/329175.aspx To quote: "Imagine this scenario. Your MAPI application running on a machine with Exchange 2000 or 2003's MAPI implementation is humming along smoothly, when a global catalog server (GC) goes down. This particular GC happens to be the one that your MAPI session is using for address book lookups (having received a referral to this GC from your Exchange server, see 256976 for more information). There are plenty of other available GC's that could serve up the GAL for you. What happens? Prior to the Exchange 2000 August 2004 Post-Service Pack 3 Rollup (870540) and Exchange 2003 SP1, your app lost all address book functionality until you logged off and established a whole new MAPI session (the new session would get a new referral from the Exchange server). This was of course not an ideal situation. So, we fixed it ;-) If you apply the 870540 rollup (for 2000) or SP1 (for 2003) onto the box where your code runs, you now have the new "GC-reconnect" logic. The idea here is that if a GC goes down, we can dynamically recover from it by dumping the bad server and going back to Exchange for a new referral, without having to start a new MAPI session. You get a MAPI_E_END_OF_SESSION error if the reconnect happens, at which time you should retry the call. So I put on the required update. I should be good to go, right? Not so fast. First thing you need to do is set some flags in your MAPI profile" We are using Exchange 2003 SP2. I had some questions I was hoping someone could help with: i) Is this to say that if an Outlook client lost connection to the GC it was using for GAL lookups prior to Exchange 2003 SP1, then the Outlook client would need to be restarted in order to pick up another GC? ii) How does this affect MAPI applications (non-Outlook)? As long as the Exchange version was post 2003 SP2, does nothing have to be configured on the application side?

i) That's the way I interpret it. ii) The way I interpret it, the application has to know to retry the call based on a returned error. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Pancamo" wrote in message news:6751a050-60d5-4293-8972-4adb04cf4a02... Hi I have been reading the following article here, entitled "Getting Exchange MAPI's GC-Reconnect stuff to work" http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonjoh/archive/2004/12/21/329175.aspx To quote: "Imagine this scenario. Your MAPI application running on a machine with Exchange 2000 or 2003's MAPI implementation is humming along smoothly, when a global catalog server (GC) goes down. This particular GC happens to be the one that your MAPI session is using for address book lookups (having received a referral to this GC from your Exchange server, see 256976 for more information). There are plenty of other available GC's that could serve up the GAL for you. What happens? Prior to the Exchange 2000 August 2004 Post-Service Pack 3 Rollup (870540) and Exchange 2003 SP1, your app lost all address book functionality until you logged off and established a whole new MAPI session (the new session would get a new referral from the Exchange server). This was of course not an ideal situation. So, we fixed it ;-) If you apply the 870540 rollup (for 2000) or SP1 (for 2003) onto the box where your code runs, you now have the new "GC-reconnect" logic. The idea here is that if a GC goes down, we can dynamically recover from it by dumping the bad server and going back to Exchange for a new referral, without having to start a new MAPI session. You get a MAPI_E_END_OF_SESSION error if the reconnect happens, at which time you should retry the call. So I put on the required update. I should be good to go, right? Not so fast. First thing you need to do is set some flags in your MAPI profile" We are using Exchange 2003 SP2. I had some questions I was hoping someone could help with: i) Is this to say that if an Outlook client lost connection to the GC it was using for GAL lookups prior to Exchange 2003 SP1, then the Outlook client would need to be restarted in order to pick up another GC? ii) How does this affect MAPI applications (non-Outlook)? As long as the Exchange version was post 2003 SP2, does nothing have to be configured on the application side? Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."