Jabber Contact Lists

[TimHuffman]

All,

I have a couple of customers who want to have a default list of employees in groups in their Jabber contact lists.  In the past, I’ve been creating the list in a Jabber client, exporting the list as CSV, and then doing a mass import of all of the contacts.

This has worked well for me in the past, but one of my customers is wanting to update this with turnover, etc. This turns into a nightmare for them as you can’t delete old employees, and you constantly have to be updating a CSV file.

I know there’s a way to use an xml file in the file menu of Jabber to do some importing, but haven’t played with this too much. Does anyone have any other ideas as to the best way to achieve this without too much of a headache? Does anyone know if Cisco has a better way of doing this road mapped?

Thanks,

Tim Huffman 

[Jaime Valencia]

Currently that's the only method for this purpose, I don't believe it was really meant for maintenance, but only for pushing the initial contact list. Roadmap questions cannot be addressed at CSC, reach your AM/SE or ask in a partner forum.

[TimHuffman]

Thanks Jamie, I also posted this out on the partner forum as well: https://communities.cisco.com/message/156080

Hopefully will have luck there.

Thanks,

Tim

[Rene Charbonneau]

We are stuck with the same problem and it is really a mess.

Before we migrated our IM infrastructure to Cisco we were using Openfire XMPP server (the old wildfire).

To reach that goal, we published a company rooster which pointed to an active directory usergroup.

So everytime a new user was added (or removed) the clients instantly had the new information in their clients.

I really don't understand what is so hard to implement such a feature. I had high hopes before we migrated to 10.0 (last week). But unfortunatly we still have to fight this sh***.

Best regards,
René

[TimHuffman]

Hi Rene,

I totally agree.  I'm going to submit a feature request with Cisco to hopefully get something added for this.

Thanks,

Tim

[Rene Charbonneau]

No, I have to thank you. Cause you are going through the trouble of opening a feature request. :)

Best regards

René

[jpoplawski]

This is ridiculous!!!  I've requested this a couple years ago.  How can I export the contact list.  At least I can do it manually.

No wonder everyone is pushing for Microsoft Lync.

[RAJAMANI Nallakaruppan]

Are you trying to export the personal contacts or the normal presence enabled jabber contacts?

There is a way to export and import presence enabled contacts

Export and import of personal contacts is not supported as of now in CUP

[fdouble08]

I want to have a user in my CUCM called "HelpDesk".  I'd like that user as the first contact in all of our Jabber users' contacts.

Can it be added to the contacts list via BAT with a Wildcard so that I do not have to export every username and then update/import a record for every user with the contact?

If not, is there a way to add it to the jabber-config.xml so that it is present on all of my Jabber clients?

[TimHuffman]

If you don't want to export, import all of those contacts, you'll probably be best off getting on version 11, creating a user named "HelpDesk" in AD that has a * or something at the front, then pushing that list out to everyone. The * should probably make it first on everyone's list, and v11 should handle the integration with AD.

[TimHuffman]

Hi jpoplawski,

Cisco is making this better.  When version 11 of UC comes out (this summer I'm told), you'll be able to manage enterprise wide contact lists with Active Directory groups.  This is for onprem deployments only, and I don't believe it will work with WebEx Connect.

As far as exporting contacts, you can easily manage this with the Bulk Admin tool on the IM & Presence server.

Thanks,

Tim

[Ivan Salazar]

hello  Tim.

I did with jabber ver 9.7.

you can create contact lists in .xml format and then import them into Cisco Jabber.

Procedure
Step 1 Open the main Cisco Jabber window.
Step 2 Select File > Import contacts....
Step 3 Browse to the location of the contact list definitions XML file.
Step 4 Select the contact list definitions file and then select Open

for example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<buddylist>
<group>
<gname>Sales</gname>
<user>
<uname>amckenzi@example.com</uname>
<fname>Adam McKenzie</fname>
</user>

<user>
<uname>aperez@example.com</uname>
<fname>Anita Perez</fname>
</user>
</group>
<group>
<gname>Marketing</gname>
<user>
<uname>nfox@example.com</uname>
<fname>Nancy Fox</fname>
</user>
</group>
</buddylist>

[TimHuffman]

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for the response.  I'm looking for an enterprise-wide way to disperse these contact lists without end user intervention.  This would be very taxing for an IT staff to touch every machine.

Thanks,

Tim

[karwah]

Hello Ivan.

Thanks for the importing of contacts info below as it works. But is there a way to include Telephone contacts?

Appreciate much if you have the solutions.

Thanks and Have a nice day.

[amchugh01]

I tried to get all my coworkers to use Cisco Jabber and when there wasn't a convenient way to import contacts the adoption rate fizzled to zero and CUPS was just contributing to the heat in my machine room. I asked around and couldn't find any easy way to create a initial list so I ended up hacking the XML format in a text editor and hand-writing in all the details and then sent them to all my coworkers. For about a hundred people it was exceptionally annoying, but once done, it's done. I'm hoping to see a non-zero adoption rate eventually. Cisco Jabber. Hah. Okay. It was a selling point, but it was mostly bright shiny. :/