How accurate is your GAL?

Administrators often don?t know just how much their users depend on the Exchange Global Address List (GAL). For users in a small or medium sized business, the GAL gives users a quick reference for looking up telephone numbers and official titles for their co-workers. In a larger organization, the GAL also provides mailing address, departmental, and organizational information for users throughout the entire organization. At the click of the mouse, this information is easily retrieved (Figure 1). Even offline Outlook users, Outlook Web Access users, and Windows Mobile users have the ability to browse the Global Address List and can access this information.

Figure 1: Viewing a user in the Global Address List

The problem with the information in the GAL is that it can quickly become out of date as users switch departments, get new cell phones, get new job titles, or move to a new office.? As the GAL information becomes stale, it becomes less useful to the user community and often sends them off on a ?wild goose chase? looking for updated information.

The challenge for a typical Exchange or Active Directory administrator is to try and keep this information up-to-date without taking up a significant part of his or her day.? A ?self service? directory application that will allow a user to edit their own information in the Active Directory can solve the dilemma of the ?stale GAL?.

Allowing user to update their own information

A number of low-cost programs that will allow a user to update their information in the GAL have come and gone, the most notable and notorious of these is a utility that came with the Microsoft BackOffice Resource Kit called GALMOD (shown in Figure 2).

Figure 2: GALMOD

The problem with most every low cost or free utility like this is that they don?t often let the user edit all the attributes you need the user to update and the information must be entered in free-form text boxes. This means that typographical errors or incorrect information are more likely to creep in to the Active Directory database. To further these weaknesses, GALMOD is a client-side application and must be configured on the user?s desktop.