Information Technologies: Porting OCS contacts over to Jabber

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Porting OCS contacts over to Jabber

We are moving from Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 to Cisco Jabber. The bad news is that we were told that contacts in our OCS will not be migrated to Jabber. We were asked to re-create our contacts in Jabber. With 100 over contacts to recreate, I started to look for solution which I can do it at the client’s side but without any luck.

But I do notice that Jabber has the function to import contacts from a XML format specified by Jabber. Below is the XML format. More information about the XML structure is explained in http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/vxc/english/vxme/9-3_jabber_adv_fg/VXME_BK_A14F54E9_00_advanced-features-guide-for-cisco-jabber/VXME_BK_A14F54E9_00_advanced-features-guide-for-cisco-jabber_chapter_010.html.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<buddylist>
  <group>
    <gname>Group Name</gname>
    <user>
      <uname>IM Address</uname>
      <fname>Display Name</fname>
    </user>
  </group>
</buddylist>

This gives me the idea to create a simple tool to generate the XML file. Now the next question is how to export the OCS contacts from the client’s side. After searching for a while, I find that the easiest way is to do a copy on the OCS group which will copy all the contacts under that group then paste them into notepad and save it as a text file. I can then use the text file to generate the XML file.

So I created a tool which I named it MigOCS2Jabber.exe. It will require .Net Framework 3.5 to run which comes with Windows 7.

You can download a copy of it from http://www.mediafire.com/download/9gu1uiuhjfdi419/MigOCS2Jabber.zip. You will need to unzip the executable file before you can use it.

Here is a quick example on how to use the tool.

Right click on the group containing the contacts you want to port over and click on “Copy” from the context menu.

Paste the copied contacts into notepad and save it as a text file. It is recommended to use the group name as the file name. This is because the tool will by default use the file name to create the group in Jabber. Anyway, you can change it in the tool if you want to rename the group name.

Double click on MigOCS2Jabber.exe to start it.

Click on the Browse button, navigate to the folder where you saved the text file and open it.

Click on the Load button to load the contacts into the list box. By default, the Contacts Group Name will use the file name without the file extension. You can change the group name if you want to.

Click on the Create button to generate the XML file. The XML File Location will show the location of the XML file. It will be in the same folder as the text file.