moving complete user accounts

[stiller]

Not sure if this is one for 'migrations' or 'administrators', but here goes:

It seems to me, that the only supported way of moving complete user accounts, including all settings (shares, rules, external accounts), is to use the NE backup/restore procedure. Unfortunately, this requires:

a) a valid NE license
b) root (or at least privileged) access to both the source and target server

Please correct me if I'm wrong. There seem to be LDAP to LDAP scripts for moving user accounts between servers, but these appear to be pretty old and unsupported.

I've encountered a number of scenarios where one or both requirements were not met. For example:
- migrating users from the CE to the NE. (this could be accomplished using a trial license, if one hasn't been used in the past)
- migrating users from a competitor who is not going to give out any administrator passwords or NE backups (or at least not in a timely fashion)

I see two possible solutions (again, please correct me if I'm missing something):
- Give non-privileged (regular) users access to their account settings through LDAP. This would probably require pretty big schema changes, so it might not be easy.
- Have the export/import scripts dump/read these settings to a regular file.

This last solution should be doable and allow all users to move freely between servers/providers without losing their precious settings.

[phoenix]

Why not just use the zmztozmig migration tool (available in OSS & NE versions of Zimbra)?

[stiller]

AFAIK, zmztozmig requires global admin access on both source and destination server (granted, it's better than root). Also, it does not migrate shares, filters and persona (external accounts) and maybe other settings. In fact, it's a front-end for the tar formatter, so it would have the same drawbacks.