Importing contacts from WebEx Connect to IM & Presence

Currently, WebEx Connect has no method of exporting contacts into Jabber or IM & Presence. I came up with this solution to help a couple of my users migrate their large contact lists, and thought I would share the solution with you. Let me know what you think.

This method relies on the use of a perl script and having the user log into pidgin XMPP client to WebEx Connect to populate the pidgin blist.xml file with the WebEx Connect contacts.

To get contacts from WebEx Connect to import into IM&P, I modified jesboat’s xml2text perl script and made some adjustments so the CSV output was formatted for use with IM&P.

Using Pidgin for Windows, set up an XMPP account using the WebEx Connect credentials, log in and have the blist.xml populated with the contacts from WebEx Connect.  You may want to rename your existing blist.xml file first so existing contacts aren’t in the xml file.

The path to the XML file is typically c:\users\userid\AppData\Roaming\.purple then the blist.xml file is in main .purple folder. You may need to go under windows folder properties and make hidden files and folders visible in windows explorer. Copy the blist.xml file to another path if you want to make running the perl script easier. In the sample below I copied the file to c:\temp.

The only limitation with this script is that groups are not being saved, I am using the domain name of the buddy/contact for the group name. For example, this will put all buddies/contacts with “user@abc.com”  into group “abc.com” and so forth. In Jabber, the groups can easily be renamed and contacts moved around. I may work on adding this later.

Running the script:

c:\temp>perl blist-imp.pl IM&P-userid IM&P-domain > test.csv

It will read in the blist.xml in the current directory.

Take the CSV file generated above and import it into IM&P. I used version 9.1.1.20000-5 for this.

This will add contacts to the system, it will not delete existing contacts.

Log into IM&P Administrator web page,

Bulk Administration -> Upload/Download Files.

On the web page that comes up, choose Add New on top and browse to CSV file and choose “Contact Lists” as target and “Import Users’ Contacts – Custom File” as Transaction type, then click the Save button to upload it.

After the CSV file is uploaded, go to Bulk Administration -> Contact List -> Update.

On the page that comes up, choose the file you uploaded above and either run immediately or run later and click Submit. This may cause brief increase in CPU usage so on busy systems you may want to do this off hours.

When the above job completes, you can go under User Management -> End User and select the user and click on their User ID and view their contacts and groups within IM&P. You can also log in to Jabber with the user now and see the newly added contacts. You can rename the groups and move contacts around easily within Jabber.

The contacts are now in IM&P and Jabber client…

Sample CSV output

c:\temp\perl blist-imp.pl testuser test.com

User ID, User Domain, Contact ID, Contact Domain, Nickname, Group Name

testuser, test.com, contact1, cisco.com,  contact1, cisco.com

testuser, test.com, buddy, companyname.com,  buddy, companyname.com

testuser, test.com, johndoe, domain.com,  johndoe, domain.com

If you are doing this for multiple users, you can combine the CSV output files into one CSV file when importing into IM&P. You need to copy / paste the contact info from each CSV without the header row. There should only be one header row on first line of combined CSV file.

The script can be downloaded here: