How to export/import MS Office Communicator contacts?

Question

I had MOC 2005 re-installed on my office PC recently, and found to my chagrine that it had lost all of my contacts. I've searched for ways to export/import the contacts list, but have not found any useful answers. Some suggest looking in the registry at key tree HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Communicator, but all I find are the titles of the contact groups I used to have (as binary Unicode values), but which MOC no longer recognizes.

My plan is to export the registry (or data file) values and then write a script to re-instate them, I just need to know where to find those values.

Any suggestions?

Update

I think I may have found the answer myself. I located an XML file in:

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\
  Microsoft\Communicator\presence_User_Name_Company_Com.xml

which appears to contain all my contact info.

I plan to examine it a little further soon.

Answer 1

open this file in excel from the following location C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\ Microsoft\Communicator\presence_User_Name_Company_Com.xml . all the contacts will be arranged in a single column. you can save it....:) easy way to take a bakup....

Answer 2

It's not possible to export directly the contents of the whole OCS map. But you can manually proceed to a separate export. Select the content of each group you have in your OCS, cut and paste in a notepad window. You get there a liste of mail addresses separated by semicolumns. create the complete list step by step, group by group. Once the list is created, you can send it to your friends, and they just have to create the groups in their own OCS, and group by group, cut and paste the rows of addresses in the group. The group is automatically updated.

Answer 3

Very helpful. Saved me a lot of time. Thanks for sharing the info.