Lync Address Book Download

The Lync address book, by default is updated every night at 1:30am.  This process updated all the delta, compact and compact delta files that are located on the Lync file share under

\\<Server FQDN>\<Share Folder>\1-WebServices-1\ABFiles

The Lync client downloads the user address book (if enabled in the client policy) for the first time after user login a random time between 0 and 60 mins.


To force the address book to download at a controlled point in time you can run a registry hack to add the GalDownloadInitialDelay value

reg add HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator /v GalDownloadInitialDelay /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

This will force the address book to download as soon as the Lync client is signed in, as long as the address book hasn't been downloaded.


To remove the previously downloaded address books you can delete the two address book files found under:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Communicator\sip_<lync_signin_address> 

1. GalContacts.db
2. GalContacts.db.idx