OriginalMigrationAssistant

Summary

Develop an application to ease transition from other platforms (primarily Windows) to Ubuntu Linux. Moving important personal data like contacts, email, calendar, browser bookmarks, etc. to Ubuntu should 'just work' automagically and not require manually moving and importing files into the respective applications. The application should rely on a plug-in architecture for the actual data migration. In case of branding conflicts (-> Apple) the tool could be named "Escape Agent".

Rationale

Switching to another system gets harder the more grown data a user relies on. Migrating address books, email, calendar, browser bookmarks, application settings etc. to Ubuntu is currently a tedious manual task. Users need to know where their applications store data, how to access this data when booted into Linux, how to make them available to the applications they like to use etc. There should be an application to assist them, turning the migration of important data into a one-step process without additional manual labour.

Use cases

Scope

Migrate basic personal data from Windows to an Ubuntu account:

  • email
  • browser bookmarks (other settings, if possible)
  • contacts
  • calendar

Design

See MigrationAssistance for a more fleshed-out version of this specification.

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

OriginalMigrationAssistant (last edited 2008-08-06 16:32:00 by localhost)