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Moving Outlook/vCards to an LDAP Address Book?
T-Suit asks: "I'm looking for a way to move 1000+ vCards (the result of painful consolidation after going through our sales' team personal Outlook contacts) into OpenLDAP, so that we can access them from all plaftorms. I've looked at Dawn, but its LDIF export is too crufty for ldapadd and it doesn't solve the issue of how to update those records easily, so I'd also need some kind of 'master GU' to edit them remotely. Along the way, I must say I am amazed at the lack of good LDAP-only contact manager apps for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Besides Evolution (which behaves strangely for me and doesn't show all the fields Outlook entries have), all 'nice' 'shared address book' tools I see are limited, web-based or rely on a SQL database. LDAP Management apps (such as diradmin) allow me to edit all fields, but are not for casual users (or available on Windows). Any suggestions on how to both import and maintain this data?"
Yes, O2003 BCM should help you out here. I was "lucky" enough to get in on beta and though it was particularly buggy and slow (expected in a beta) it offered a lot of features including what you are looking for.
Sadly, you will have to wait a month or two and fork over a couple hundred bucks-- but it seems like you have those kind of resources.
The New Root Council, kickin' ass sinc
Place a Rolodex in a central location. Perhaps by the coffee machine.
You could take a look at an application called GroupWise by Novell. It is web based and offers a powerful backend. It has powerful LDAP tools that can be viewed and edited on any platform. Also, it is widely scaleable. But it is a tad on the slow side. A small price to pay if it gets the job done, huh?
The New Root Council, kickin' ass sinc
If I were you, I'd take advantage of the glut of unemployed coders and have someone make you a web-based frontend to a perl or C based backend solution for this problem. Perl would probably work fine. It's kinda what it's designed for. Something like this would be pretty damn easy actually. Then you could/would have an application that does exactly what you want it to do, and the source to make modifications down the road if you need it.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Have someone make you a webmin module that does this and be the hero that shares it with the world.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
SunOne/IPlanet/Netscape directory server has a nice gooey GUI for adding/searching/modifying. Searches can be done via web-browser...
So, just make an OU for contacts, dump the contacts in with Perl, create accounts for your salesy people and give them admin privilege of the contacts ou. It'll take a little time to get all the bugs worked out and lusers trained, but it will be functional from the start. I think.
Then you hire someone to come in and write a couple of little Perl CGI's using the PerlDap module or the variety of others available. I've been messing around with one that allows lusers to update a few of their records via Apache (perl modules CGI, PerLdap; Apache module mod_auth_ldap). Not too hard.
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Text::vCard;
use Net::LDAP;
# remainder left as an exercise for the poster.
Hi,
I made a little ruby-script (my first!), which achieves something like that.
It's far from perfect, but works for me.
download it here
The archive containt a procmailrc, because i'm invoking it via an extra email-address. you will need ripmime
The script uses the vcard-Class from ruby-lang.org, which is included in the archive.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I have found LDAP Browser/Editor to work pretty good. Java app.
LDAP Explorer is a decent web interface.
What I did was to use Dawn to produce an initial .ldif file. Then I wrote a little script to massage entries based on the dn's and ou's that I wanted to use. Create said dn's and ou's via a seperate, hand crafted .ldif, a quick little exercise, bring in your massaged .ldif, and you're set.
To manage, phpLDAPadmin is the best tool I've found so far.
Outlook, Mozilla, etc. can all access as clients.
I also recommend LDAP System Administration by Gerald Carter, though with some reservations. It provides a decent grounding in LDAP, but won't be an end-all-be-all definitive resource.
... at http://www.savoirfairelinux.com/labe/ seems like a nice, simple, straightforward, PHP-based tool that you might be able to adapt, if not use?
That's because LDAP sucks.
Now away from opinion: Outlook, like most windows apps allows for COM interfaces. Perl, PHP, or heaven forbid Visual Basic have COM interfaces. It's pretty simple to use MS's helpful documentation of the Outlook COM functions to write up your own contact extraction utility. Once you have the data, it's pretty trivial to format it and/or toss it into another DB.
get rid of windows, problem solved. Performance is a tad better using the REAL java runtime from sun though as opposed to the microsoft bastardized version.
Check out eGuide.
It's a free (as in $), java servlet based white pages that works against LDAP, and all the display is done in XSLT so its very customizable.
Evolution uses a strange schema type called evolutionPerson (google for it or check /usr/share/doc/evolution). In short it maps some datafields to regular organizationalPerosn while other fall in custom attributes. There are special directives to map attributes to other using something like regexps (help! I once read it on a long persentation... my HD is 30/37 GB full... no wait... haha! HERE!... it's in the LDAP section) so essentially you could manually map some fieldls to other to change the overall LDIF upon insertion. Otherwise just hack a script (in an ldif aware lang... say perl/php... ruby?) to parse the whacko entryes and reformat to your needs. In my little setup anyway Directory Administrator (linux gtk tool) is good enough for maintentance and except for system attributes (uid,guid,uname,etc...) I give users full self ACL rw perms. This way, users of Evo have to login/pw to access the Directory, and can use the whole dataset but edit/correct only their own account specifics.
Enjoy... it's cool... beats M$ AD's 5c per transacion ;-)
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
GroupWise can be extremely buggy, and you'll spend a lot of time retraining your Outlook users. And none of them will like the switch.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Me and my friends here in India would be loving to help you out of your predicament. My team consists of the finest young plucky software engineers versed in all the latest technologies and will eagerly do this for you for only $10 total. This includes a complete set of documentation and followup, project management and five happy programmers to code your solution using on the best of software development methodologies. All for only $10.
Of course then we have your entire contact database which we can either use for our own personal profits (legal or otherwise) or maybe we just sell it to all your competitors for a nice tidy profit. Then you will be fuxored pretty bad, but hey - at least it only cost you $10.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
We used a program called AddressMagic to convert the 7000 or so Outlook "Contacts Folder" contacts to LDIF in an attempt to get them into OpenLDAP. Much like you our efforts were in vain. Outlook's got too much crap in there that's just plain undocumented but our office staff use (categories being the biggest one).
I've been playing with Exchange4Linux -- Crappy name but some really nifty software. Everything is stored in PostgreSQL -- everything -- This is both a good thing and a bad thing; Postgres is well up to the task, but the E4L server software is quite slow at the moment. They've written it in Python, and it talks to the proprietary Outlook connector via CORBA. Why CORBA? I dunno; it doesn't talk through firewalls worth a shit. :-(
I've successfully imported our 4000 contacts without even blinking. I also imported an additional 3.2GB of email, journals, notes and schedule data. Postgres just took it in and asked for more. This is on a server with an UW3 disk subsystem and 1G of memory.
Looking at the DB any "pure" MAPI object is stored in plain english, both by parameter name and value. Any Outlook-specific crap is stored with MAPIhexstringhere names and whatever data format Outlook uses for the data. It would be dead simple trivial to convert that into LDAP, but why bother when PostgreSQL has an LDAP frontend you can probably get working.
The nicest thing about E4L is that the Outlook guys lose zero functionality and (when completed) the IMAP, LDAP and iCAP frontends will give full connectivity to the entire OSS crowd. E4L is planning on making money selling Outlook connector licenses (which aren't that dear, really) but as I mentioned earlier, the server is 100% OSS and free (beer and libre). I realize that oGo is out there but to be honest, oGo looks enormously complex and it's written in a hideous language. I'd rather spend my time learning Python than Objective-C any day, thank you very much. E4L's got a single unified backend (PostgreSQL) which is scalable and solid, and with some more work (moving more into stored procedures, using the LDAP frontend, etc.) it will be an Exchange killer. It already works flawlessly with Outlook, as I mentioned.
I'm afraid I can't help with the import/export part of your problem, though a little perl hacking may be the best route there...
You should check out the Horde Project's Turba module. It provides contact management services that integrate with Horde's other services (such as IMP, the webmail component). Check out the page for Turba here:
http://www.horde.org/turba/
Turba can use several backends, including LDAP (which is how I have it configured). I've never tried to set Turba up standalone (I have it set up as the address book for webmail), but I believe it should be possible (all of the modules are highly configurable and able to operate independently of each other).
It's web-based, so it should work on any platform. All you need is LDAP, and a PHP-cabable web server. And if you set up your LDAP permissions correctly, you can even have multiple address books (e.g., Shared and Personal) so people can keep their own lists that others can't muck with.
Good luck!
Your attempt at imitating a Indian speaker is funny, but not the way you think. The broken pseudo-english you came up with might sound right from someone in the middle east, for whom English is a second language - but educated Indians speak the Queens English very well (better than you probably do) - and those verbal and written communication skills are another reason beyond cost and technical prowess why Indian programmers are sought after as the leading offshore alternative.
Here in the US, the educational system needs to take literacy much more seriously if US coders are not to become the $10 programmers of tomorrow.
I've just been through a sort of similar exercise.
We regularly receive a corporate address list of some 150,000 addresses.
The Exchange GAL was slowing down, so a decision was made to move these addresses to OpenLDAP.
It does the trick alright, but mapping the fields was like trial and error. The OpenLDAP forums and Google helped a lot there.
Now Outlook clients add a directory service and point it to the LDAP server. Remember to install the MS patch/registry hack else resolving addresses from the To: box will time out. Also get the LDAP indexing right cause that's slow too.
I think you can edit addresses directory from outlook, or am I confused with Windows Address Book. Or am I just confused.
Anyway, Reply if you want those mappings?
File Import and Export... [starts wizard]
Export the suckers as csv/Excel
import into new favorite address app
retain users
long way but should work
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Have you considered reading all the cards in and writing them to a CSV or TAB delimited file? :p ).
This should be trivial (maybe 5 lines) in perl if you know the format of the cards (spec available at http://www.imc.org/pdi/, assuming MS followed the spec
Then, you could import the one file into your new ldap database, and use whatever you want to manage it after that.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
If you then took some time to actually attempt to use those software you snidely point to, you would discover that none of them can be used to solve the poster's problem. . . unless of course the poster is willing and able to do a lot of custom coding and to become an LDAP expert in the process.
These tools may be worth checking out too...
http://rolodap.sourceforge.net/
http://ldap-abook.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/directorymanage
iF yOu WAnT to C YOUr iP agaIn gAThEr tWO MilLIon dOLLArS IN Non - cONsEcuTivE TweNtY's AnD AWaiT FuRThER iNstrUctIoN
Not to be dragged too far off topic, but if you honestly believe the outsourcing / migration of jobs to ANYWHERE has anything to do with any aspect of business except dollars, you are sadly deluded. I have had to hang up a zillion times on tech support calls to callers with accents so thick I couldn't understand them.
They are not technological wizards that have backgrounds of 10 years plus diagnosing hardware / network issues and immediately recognize that 8 beeps means your motherboard is complaining about a problem with your video card, know that a SCSI terminator before the new hard drive you just added (instead of on the end of the cable) means that no matter what you do the new drive isn't going to be seen, or know from experience that you are going to need to bump the voltage to 2.2v to run a Celeron 300a at 450MHz, particularly if the first number on the FPO/BATCH number is a 0 (ie, chip is from Costa Rica.)
They are polite script monkeys that are quite happy to read through tech support scripts for $1.50 an hour while punctuating their sentences with 'please', 'thank you', and 'berry good'. That the customers are getting wicked pissed off is of no concern because hey, it is only costing the company $10 a day.
Quite honestly nothing would make me happier than to have the Paki's rain thermo-nuclear bombs on all of the new tech-parks that IBM and Dell just built over there. Every American tech worker is thinking it right now, but few are willing to actually say it.
Outsourcing has nothing to do with the Queens English, or their verbal / written comms skills. It has everything to do with working for 83 cents an hour. Ask the Russian and Chinese folks that are also getting outsource work.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Will make the coffee for you ;-)
;-)
(Much) Anticipated system requirement: CPU 2GHz minimum recomended, Memory 1GB, HD 20GB
That will be a great embed system, isn't it
I run a seven server, 3000 user GroupWIse system, and my users are happy, things work well, the servers have uptimes approaching 200 days, backups work perfectly without shutting down the agents, and have actually only lost two people's mailboxes in six years.
Your first complaint, that the mail is encrypted, is a feature, not a bug. What, you want your people to have no privacy to make *your* job easier?
The client isn't flakey if the underlying machine/OS isn't flakey.
You should be using the Open File Manager for your backups. You should implement Restore Areas so your users can self-serve their own restores. I have the stand-alone GWBackup.exe running on a cron job (essentially) for this.
You have as much administrative control over the mailboxes as your company policy allows - I don't see the failure to get buy off from management as a defect in GroupWise.
I imagine you got 'volunteered' to run the system, or that you have management that doesn't support you to set the thing up correctly. You might try to gently suggest to them that mail is always rated as the #1 important application in any enterprise. It is in your companie's best interest to support / assist you to configure / reconfigure your system to optimal performance.
I recently created a directory of about 700 vCards for my boss, who then wanted it in his quickmail contact book. Low and behold, quickmail of course doesn't import vcards, only ldif and outlook express files. Anybody have a good way to convert one to the other?