Understanding Address Book Policies

           Address book policies use to limit the information that users see in their GAL. Some organizations require that certain users be prohibited from seeing all of the other users in the GAL.

           Limiting what users can see in the GAL is called GAL segmentation. In Exchange Server 2013, you can use address book policies to configure GAL segmentation. When

configuring an address book policy, you assign a GAL, an offline address book, a room list, and one or more address lists to the policy. You then can assign the address book policy to mailbox users, which means that the users can only see the objects in the GAL that are part of their policy.

           Address book policies are only applied when the user’s mailbox is located on an Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 (SP3) or Exchange Server 2013 server. If you update the address book policy, the clients must reconnect their mailboxes before the new policy is applied. If a client accesses the global address list through other means, such as a direct LDAP query to a global catalog server, the address book policy does not apply.