Bulk Contact Change

[rotorboy]

Greetings.

I've just setup a bunch of new users on Zimbra and the first user has imported their contacts. They want to display contacts by Company Name then First/Last Name. The only way we can see to do this is to one by one go through the thousands of contacts and edit them individually.

Of course, that's insane... no one has that kind of time. There must be another way to set this - I just can't seem to find it in searching the site. Anyone done this?

[bdial]

there is a handy utility that can manipulate just about anything in a person's account called zmmailbox.

Zmmailbox - Zimbra :: Wiki

you could write a script that would use zmmailbox to loop through all the contacts and modify that. and it won't hurt to get familiar wtih it since it's a very handy tool

[rotorboy]

Assuming it is this:

modifyContactAttrs(mcta) [opts] {contact-id} [attr1 value1 [attr2 value2...]]

That's great... but how do I find out what I need to modify and how not to screw it up.

This is really something that would be best served via GUI... since it's the end users that will want/need this functionality.

[bdial]

if you do

zmmailbox -z -m <account> gact

you'll see htat each contact has an id. then you can run

zmmailbox -z -m <account> gct <id>

and you'll see all the attribute names that the person has filled out. empty ones won't show, so if you're curious what one is called just fill it in for a test user or something. the one you're looking for i think is fileAs which is a number that corresponds to one of he options.

[storm]

Not sure if this will help:

Contact Organizer | Zimbra :: Gallery

It's not ideal, but it may help with the example you gave...

But I agree, there should be a better way to bulk-edit contacts; perhaps a useful method would be a simple way of exporting contacts as csv so they can be bulk-edited in a spreadsheet program, and then reimporting them; but asking Zimbra to replace the existing contacts with the imports.

It's currently possible at present, but it would mess up the contact photographs for example... and probably wouldn't end up the same. The existing contacts would all have to be deleted before re-importing the contacts.

[storm]

Further to my last message, it seems that neither will tags (seemingly) re-import back into Zimbra.