Oracle Connector for Outlook: Dude, Where's My Contacts?

So we just helped several thousand folks in New Zealand migrate their calendars from OCS to Exchange 2007 and they called us across the Pacific (Side bar: Across the Pacific is a WAY better movie than Dude, Where's My Car?) for some insight into how to migrate their contact data using Oracle Connector for Outlook and PSTs.

They tried the obvious method of just opening the local PSTs and the contact data from OCS was not there. This sounding like the kind of spooky weirdness that intrigues us in the calendar migration business we needed to dust off and install Oracle Connector for Outlook, look into this, and discover that it indeed is the case.

Initially we thought it might be that Offline Use needed to be enabled (we got that hare-brained idea from one of Oracle's architectural diagrams of OCFO), so we set that.

And we followed through on the Offline Folders Setting:

There is indeed a PST file there (which is usually a good sign)

but when I opened this PST in Outlook on a different machine there were no contacts.

In OCFO I see this:

In "New" Outlook I see this (we had no doubt our friends in New Zealand were correct about this, but we love the phrase "trust but verify"):

We did manage to extract the contact data and what we had to do was make it all REALLY EXPLICIT. Note that I also used two different versions of Outlook (2002 vs. 2003) just to keep the locations straight.

To start in OCFO select File-Import and Export:

You're exporting to a file

In fact a PST


And all we want right now is the Contacts:


Pick a location where you can save it (I picked next to the standard Outlook.PST file, because the size difference 48 vs 64 KB between the two is interesting).

And voila.

Now on the Exchange side, you can run the process in reverse, or you can use Data File Management

Add a new PST, Point to your contacts.pst file,

And the end result is that you've got your contacts over:

So for the really curious calendar person: What the heck is going on here?

Let's take a look at the file structure of OCFO. Almost all the files under the /Outlook/Oracle Connector... directory are pretty small, except for the one I found called "mdb" which being within the same order of magnitude as the PST files we found makes it a good candidate for the location where OCFO data gets stored.

In fact there are several of these throughout this directory structure. Those of you who ever had the pleasure of working in 1980's era dBase will feel deja-vu. I started doing correlations between GUIDs for the contacts in Outlook/OCFO and the data here using a binary viewer, but that got to be a hassle very quickly. Russ looked at running SOAP requests for contact data using the OCS API, which he rapidly decided was "obscure and painful."

We know the contact data is in there (somewhere), but the method we sketch above has the advantages of being simple, fast, and actionable without coding.