Have no fear! Scribe Insight is here!
I know, I know. That's cheesy. But the fact is that Scribe Insight is an extremely valuable tool.
Scribe Insight is a product from Scribe Software that is used to migrate data from one database to another, or to integrate systems. Learn more here: http://www.scribesoftware.com/microsoft-dynamics-crm.asp.
As an example, a project I'm working on involves migrating the following objects from Salesforce.com to Microsoft CRM:
- Leads
- Accounts
- Contacts
- Opportunities
- Events
- Tasks
- Notes
Scribe connects directly to both the Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM databases, so there is no extracting of data into a staging database, no CSV or text files, and no Excel files. The data is extracted from Salesforce.com, transformed, and loaded into Microsoft CRM in one step with no human intervention.
While some of the fields are direct mappings with no transformations, other data must be transformed to some degree. For example, a text field in Salesforce.com might be mapped to a picklist in Microsoft CRM, which stores a number in the database rather than the actual text. Or a field might be a picklist in Salesforce.com, but a lookup to a custom entity in Microsoft CRM. Or a 255-character text field for the address in Salesforce.com must be split into three 50-character fields (line1, line2, and line3) in Microsoft CRM. Scribe Insight handles all of these situations, and many more.
Normally, moving data from Salesforce.com to Microsoft CRM can be a pain, but Scribe Insight and the adapters for Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM make the process relatively painless. As a result we are able to migrate thousands of records within minutes or hours.
Typically, we migrate selected data into Microsoft CRM, validate the data, make changes to the data mappings, if necessary, and then continue migrating additional data. Once all data has been validated and the users have completed their testing and training, we'll delete all the test migration data from Microsoft CRM and run all the migration processes one last time at cutover. This process works very well.
While many people consider data migration a "technical" task, you don't want to delegate this to the technical people unless they have a complete understanding of the data that is in Salesforce.com: what it represents and how it is used. And I do mean complete. Somebody who understands what every field represents and how it should be mapped to Microsoft CRM MUST be involved.
This project will be going live next week. Thanks to Scribe Insight, the data migration has been a complete success.
