Personal Contacts from LDAP

[dijichi2]

hi

i'm working on a couple of zimbra installs, trying to 'invisibly' replace existing mail systems by using migrating mail accounts over and continuing to use imap for client access, NOT the zimbra web client (for now, that will come later). main email clients are thunderbird, netscape and outlook/express. the mail is fine, the clients hardly notice any difference. however, contacts are an issue - typically these are stored either in local mozilla abook.mab on each local/roaming profile or in ldap. i would like to unify all the various address books into a central server solution and zimbra contacts, ie personal address book, would seem to be the logical place to do this.

however looking into things it appears that only the gal is usable via ldap and even that is a pretty severe security risk currently, and the personal contacts are only available via soap api. this is crazy - all the current mail clients use ldap as the primary method of remote address books. is there way, even a hack/bodge, to allow this? is there any plans for addressing (sorry, no pun intended) this issue?

[marcmac]

We don't store contacts in ldap - they're in the message store, so they can be tagged, searched, synced, backed up with the mailbox, etc. That's why soap is the access to the contacts.

[FunkyPenguin]

How would you pull the contacts from Zimbra if it isn't using LDAP? Is there a way similar to the calendar? I'm looking at pulling the contacts into Thunderbird Addressbook, Evolution and KOrganizer primarily.

Being able to keep all contacts in sync would be crucial.

[KevinH]

You can export them to csv. We plan to provide other exports via our REST api's later.

[czaveri]

I tried the following:

/usr/libexec/evolution/2.6/evolution-addressbook-export --format=csv --output=/home/czaveri/tmp/contacts_ev.csv

and tried to import in Zimbra but only one contact is imported.

Idea?

[phoenix]

Is the file in the correct format, there's a post by KevinH about the format required. Does this thread shed any light on your problem?

[czaveri]

Originally Posted by phoenix

Is the file in the correct format, there's a post by KevinH about the format required. Does this thread shed any light on your problem?

Thanks Phoenix,

I realized that some fields were named incorrectly, like:
First Name was given_name
Last Name was last_name

All contacts imported. Thank-you,

Sincerely,