Migrating from Outlook 2003 to Thunderbird = A Series of Small, Painful Steps
1/12/2010
The purpose of the migration: to save money and test-drive some of these 'cloud apps' that are comin' to fruition. I'm not finished migrating yet (squawk squawk!), but I'm already curling my toes in frustration. Exchange Server might be easier to configure than dealing with dozens of tiny add-ons, extensions, conversion tools etc.
One of my goals today was to import a rather large amount of contacts from Outlook to Thunderbird. Sounds simple, right?
WRONG!
Since I'm test driving an installation of vTiger CRM (not linking because I'm affiliated, nor am I at the stage to recommend vTiger, just for reference), I tried to use the vTiger add-on for Thunderbird, since I have managed to successfully import all of the contacts into the vTiger database.
That didn't work. It failed majestically. Within seconds, I received an error. It wouldn't connect even though my login and location settings were accurate. Forum searches revealed that everyone else has the same problem, that the connector is a serious pile of smegma and should be wiped from the intertubes (though apparently it did work for previous versions of vTiger and TB).
So I thought I'd use the direct route, the import feature of TB. I clicked on tools : import and tried to point it directly to Outlook. The GUI said it was importing, but my address book only contained one contact once the import finished (even though it seemed to take awhile). FAIL.
Then I tried pointing the import feature to the Contacts backup PST. Suddenly, strange french error messages were popping up in TB, the application crashed, and nothing was imported. FAIL.
At this point I'm thinking: WTF? Are ALL of these open source db 'solutions,' cloud apps and plugins just pieces of crap? So far, yes. Every cloud app I've tried, aside from my Pogoplug at home, has failed on me more than it has succeeded. I'm losing patience. Every add-on for synchronizing data with Outlook and vTiger, or TB and vTiger, or TB and Outlook, or TB and Gmail, or Outlook and Gmail, have all pretty much failed or produced enough errors to consider them useless.
Anyway, back to my task at hand.
I thought... maybe the 'new' (post 2002) PST format was the reason the import feature within TB was not working, so I created a new PST in the old format. Still didn't work. The result was the same as before; it imported only one contact but seemed to take awhile to do it.
Then I tried making a CSV from outlook. The field mappings were all over the place in Thunderbird. I DO NOT recommend this method; once you move one header to the appropriate slot within Thunderbird, the headers above and below move, too, thus making it impossible to line them up. In addition, you're limited to four custom fields which you cannot rename (and my custom contacts form in Echange held much more data than a simple email address book can, much to the demise of the entire project... but let's gloss over that, shall we? Who would ever have thought that I might give kudos to Microsoft for anything... ).
I very nearly gave up. But I was thinking.... what about vcards?
Guess what? Thunderbird doesn't have a built-in method for importing .vcf files (which, incidentally, I downloaded from my contacts backup on Gmail). I even tried emailing the file to myself, which didn't work. I double-clicked on the .vcf and nada happened.
After a little googling, I stumbled upon a solution, a simple online conversion tool that takes vcards and converts them to LDIF files. You can find it here.
Within seconds, I was saving my LDIF and importing it into Thunderbird. SUCCESS!
All my contacts are now stored in Thunderbird. It only took me about 3 hours.
Final thoughts on the subject: Get your shit together, Mozilla. Get your shit together vTiger. Your apps are great for simple uses, but for real business/tech environments, the non-working bits of your proggies can cause more headaches than Outlook and Exchange, and that's really sad to me.
But I'm glad it's finished (well... I still need to review some of the imported data to see if anything is missing that is essential, all 1800 contacts or so.)
Now onto pistol-whipping vTiger into some sort of usable state. I'm losing hope, but I'm not giving up.
The pain I put myself through just to get away from Exchange $$$erver.
posted by novachild @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010,
