Import contact lists from thunderbird / Mozilla

[NOZIL]

Hi all,

I have the method to import all my contacts from thunderbird/mozilla to zimbra
(export to csv, use open office model and import to zimbra).

BUT, i still have problem with contact groups.
Each contact group in thunderbird becomes an adress book in zimbra

So i have to re-create contact group in zimbra from that newly created adresse book.

Is there a way to automate this task ?

Manually it's a pity :

Difficulty 1 : There is no way to choose a particular adresse book where to pick the adress to put in the contact group. So it's very hard to recreate a contact group, especially if it contains lot of conatcts.

Difficulty 2 : When you have many contact groups to import, this job is getting my IT support mad !!!

[pshah]

Sounds like a bug in our import code. We should be able to handle importing groups/distribution lists from other clients.

Can you file a new bug with repro steps?

[NOZIL]

Import used from cvs file just import contacts, or i'm wrong ?
HOw do you import contact groups ?

[pshah]

Oops. You're right. Only contacts get exported (even in Outlook). I wonder if there's a better way to do this.. I'll ask around internally.

[NOZIL]

Thanks for asking.
This process takes my IT team a lot of time to switch users from thunderbird to zimbra (from 1/2 hour up to 2 hours, depending of the number of contacts groups in thunderbird).
And we have more than 700 users to migrate !!!

[dlbewley]

I'm also seeking a solution to import Contact Groups (dist lists) from Outlook Express to Zimbra. The PST import wizard from 4.5.4 doesn't seem to do it.

[NOZIL]

Any news or miracle solution to import contact groups from thunderbird to zimbra ?

[jjk005]

Has a solution to this been found yet? I face similar problems to those previous....

[mheid5]

We also have 900+ users to migrate. We're manually copying distribution lists/contact groups from Netscape/Mozilla and from Outlook. We're saving as .rtf and then we copy/paste into a new contact group. Still slow, but not as slow as typing...
An update on status will be appreciated.
thanks!

[jjk005]

It seems that Zimbra can preserve contact list hierarchies. This is seen when one exports an addressbook from zimbra. the problem is that thunderbird et all need to output their heirarchy into one file, as opposed to piecemeal. once that happens then at least a converter util can be made. Since thunderbird is open source, it seems like such a feature can be contributed, and if zimbra is open source, or its devs want to collaborate with the mozilla devs then I bet this might actually happen. I'll see what i can do, time permitting. any feedback from the devs would be welcome.

-josh