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.
6 comments:
Yep, we would agree Scribe is a very useful tool. However, you do need to build the scripts to carry out the migration. Based on this experience we have built CRMMigrate http://www.qgate.co.uk/crmmigrate/ which makes the task as close to a no brainer as possible. You can try it for no cost and it will ship 25 accounts and related records to your test Dynamics CRM instance from Salesforce.com. We also supply a XML config file to add the required entities and attributes to the standard CRM schema to accomadate the data of the standard SFDC schema. CRMMigrate will of course handle custom entities as well. Look out for the next release of CRMMigrate which will handle migration from Goldmine.
I know Scribe Insight can do the job in a pinch, but what about the free CRM Data Migration Manager? Doesn't it have a Salesforce.com adapter too? Does it just not suffice?
Thanks,
-Christian
www.crmdynamo.com
Christian,
I have used the Data Migration Manager once to import Salesforce.com data into Microsoft CRM 4.0. I got it to work, but it was more time consuming than with Scribe. A few key limitations of the DMM:
1) The DMM can't read the Salesforce.com database directly, while Scribe can. This means that data must be exported from Salesforce.com to CSV files.
2) The DMM has limitations on the size of the CSV file it can work with. If you have a lot of data, you will need to split up the CSV files into multiple files, and process them separately. This was a HUGE pain for me. The more data, the more work for you.
3) The DMM processes data very slowly. Scribe is very fast (thousands of records inserted or updated in minutes).
4) The transformation features of DMM are weak and cumbersome. Scribe's features are more like formulas in Excel - very easy and intuitive.
5) And here's a HUGE key: our client had to pay big bucks to have Salesforce.com extract data from the database and create the CSV files. In fact, they had to pay about 4 times the cost of Scribe! With Scribe's Adapter for Salesforce.com, you can extract the data directly from the database without Salesforce.com getting involved. And you can migrate it to Microsoft CRM in the same step.
Those are the basics. Hope this helps.
Rowland,
Thanks for the info on CRMMigrate.
All very good points. Those reasons would definitely merit shelling out cash for Scribe. Thanks!
To anyone who happens upon this post, I would warn you not to deal with qgate and CRMMigrate. Although the software is great, the company is completely unresponsive to emails and phone calls. I tried on no less than 5 occasions to contact them about BUYING their software, and all of my attempts were met with silence.
Programming ability they might have, but their sales, support, and overall business model fails miserably.
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