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Migrating Data To Microsoft's CRM 4.0
By Brad Foutz
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-08-04
I have started the data migration from our own homegrown CRM system to Microsoft's CRM 4.0. The data set is pretty large, not millions of records but large enough that I can't manually massage the data.
Finding an automated way of importing the data without (or with very minimal clean up) touching it is paramount. I figured since I am able to get the data easily into an Excel and CSV format that I should be able to quickly import it. I have run into some issues with that idea.
First when I run an import job into MSCRM I need to assign an owner to each record that is imported. Unfortunately, you can't import an owner field or least when I tried I got an error.
Second, MSCRM separates leads and accounts into different entities with different attributes. Our current system has a status field which indicates whether it is active, prospect, inactive, dead, etc.
I need to separate out these statuses and run them as different import jobs. Not only that but I need to do it based on owner name. So I figure that with 10 salespeople and 6 different statuses I will need to run 60 different import jobs. The import engine in CRM is also not the easiest to figure out.
I have run into problems where is seems that the engine is ignoring commas. I figure another day's worth of work and I should have the data separated properly. The only other item that I am worried about is running the actual import job. Figuring out the failures can be very time consuming.
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About the Author:
Brad Foutz started working in IT after traveling around a bit. When he came back he decided to finish up school so he went to University of Maryland, Baltimore County to study Information system. Brad's years of experience have allowed him to work in helpdesk, system analysis, system/network administrator, network consultant and system architecture. Check out his blog, IT Network Guru.
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