Error message: “Address is not valid.” when adding a contact in MOC (OCS 2007 R2)

Problem

We’re finally cutting the rest of the people to OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise Voice for a client who we’ve done a Nortel BCM and OCS 2007 R2 integration this month and as we were training users on how to use MOC, one of the users ran into a problem when adding a contact through the Add a Contact… option:

…where they would receive the error:

Address is not valid.

The address you typed is not valid.

Valid addresses use the format username@domain (someone@example.com). Make sure there are no spaces in the address.

Click Back to retype the address.

Note: If you’re wondering why we were adding contacts this way, it’s because we enable all the users just before they head into training so they can still use their old phones before they come in which means the problem we need to deal with is that the users will not immediately have the GalContacts.db downloaded.

Going back to the problem, the user experiencing this problem was only getting the old contacts when they type in a user who was just enabled for OCS (people in his training session):

Solution

Since the problematic contacts appeared to be users who were newly enabled for OCS, I figure it’s most likely because the address book server hasn’t generated the new address book OR the user hasn’t downloaded the latest one (which would explain why he could see other users properly).

What I ended up doing was:

Went into the user profile directory at: %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Communicator\ to completely remove his MOC profile:

Then logged on to the server to force the address book server to regenerate the addresses with:

C:\"Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\Server\Core"\abserver.exe -regenUR
C:\"Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\Server\Core"\abserver.exe -syncnow

After completing the steps above, the user was now able to add the problematic contacts via the Add a Contact… option.