Address Book views is a feature that allows administrators to control which entries users are allowed to see in the global address book. This feature also allows users to sort their views of the Address Book by mailbox attribute, depending on the permissions they have been granted by the administrator. Address Book views are grouped into containers that contain recipients with common attributes.
When you create an Address Book view, you can group mailboxes by any four of eight standard attributes and ten custom defined attributes. Subcontainers are created that correspond to the four groupings. In addition, you, as an administrator, can assign search roles to the view. The search role limits who has access to an address book view. Thus, you can limit users' search capabilities to only those containers for which they have permissions.
Clients not on a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) who are working offline will see a different view. They will view the offline Address Book. If Address Book views for the offline Address Book are put in place before the first synchronization of the offline Address Book , the offline user is presented with a choice of address book views to download, depending on their permissions. However, if the client who is working offline has downloaded a full copy of the offline Address Book before the address views have been implemented, that client will always be able to see the full membership of the offline Address Book . If you subsequently limit that client's access by using address book views, the client will still be able to view all the members of the Address Book that were replicated to the offline Address Book .
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) clients can access Microsoft Exchange Server Address Books, and the same permissions and views apply as for Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) clients.
For more information, see Microsoft Exchange Server Operations.