Building GoldMine relationship trees with Inaport
Guest blogger Gail Darling of leading GoldMine partner infoSpectrum describes how she used Inaport to automatically build and update GoldMine relationship trees for a manufacturing customer. Relationship trees are very useful to provide navigation around complex account/contact structures, but they can be difficult to set up and maintain. Over to Gail…
InfoSpectrum’s client had a problem. It was using GoldMine to manage clients and the sales process, but was finding it difficult to view customers from an account perspective.
A leading manufacturer and supplier of antibodies, antigens and critical assay reagents, this client’s customer base includes many large organizations with contacts in different locations. Being able to view activities and relationships from a customer account perspective is imperative for winning and maintaining business. The solution lay with Inaport’s Relationship Builder.
At times in chez InaPlex, we are slightly dumbfounded by where our users take our product.
Guest blogger Justin Knieling of Grand Canyon University has been pushing the boundaries for a while, but now he has excelled himself. In this post, he describes using Inaport to move MSCRM views from one organization to another. Please note that in this particular scenario, he is using a SQL connection to the source CRM system, as he has it on premise. This might not work, or may need modification, if you are running hosted.
Over to Justin…
We often find ourselves needing to move system views from one Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 organization to another. A recent example of this was when we had a department who wanted to start using the case entity in CRM. They developed views to display their department’s cases along with some other views for activities related to the cases. Overall, I think there were about 15 views they created in our development environment.
Lift & Shift … with added Brains
Guest blogger, David Stewart from Aurise Consulting Ltd (www.aurise.com), outlines an application of Inaport to import and de-duplicate data records. David is a software consultant, based in Edinburgh, who recently delivered a project for a public sector organisation. The project was to deliver a database, built on the Dynamics CRM platform, to store consumer information. Inaport was a key component of the application fabric and fulfilled the requirement to import many millions of source data records.
Over to David …
I was recently engaged by a public sector organisation to build a series of databases consisting of individuals from around the world who asked to receive tailored information. The driver for the project was the replacement of a third party supplier, and the decision was taken to rebuild the new database from scratch rather than purchasing the existing database. This decision initiated the requirement to import ten years of interaction history for each customer.
Inaport – Canary in a coal mine
Guest blogger Steve Neil outlines a unique application of Inaport in this post. Steve is an IT Director for Grand Canyon University, based in Phoenix, Arizona. Steve and his team implemented Microsoft CRM 2011, then proceeded to embed it into the information fabric of the organization by using Inaport to move data between the various information repositories and CRM. Their CRM information has rapidly moved to being the portal of choice for students and staff at the University.
Over to Steve.
The title of this post might strike you as strange when the topic is a something so far removed from mining as a data tool, but it really is the best description I can think of to describe a unique function that Inaport fulfills for our enterprise. Let me lay down a little background here – the coal mine – and then I’ll explain how Inaport gives us first alert functionality.
Inaport review on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog
Guest blogger CRM MVP Neil Benson of Customery talks about a toolset that he recommends to his CRM implementation friends and partners.
Neil’s conclusion:
InaPlex Inaport 7.2 enables data analysts, with little or no programming skills, to meet sophisticated data integration requirements involving Microsoft CRM. It offers a rich set of features way beyond the CRM Data Import Wizard and comparable with much more expensive mid-market ETL tools such as Scribe Insight. InaPlex provided fantastic customer service and support throughout my project.
Read the full post here.
InaPlex to exhibit at Extreme 2011 in Las Vegas
For the second year running, InaPlex is a sponsor and exhibitor at Extreme 2011, in Las Vegas from October 2nd to 5th.
If you are planning to attend but have not yet registered, you can do so here.
We look forward to welcoming our partners and customers, and making new acquaintances. We will be in the exhibition hall; if you would like to set up a private session, please contact info@inaplex.com.
Migrate GoldMine to Microsoft CRM 2011 – Part 2
Part 1 of this series outlined some of the basic issues involved in migrating GoldMine to another CRM system.
This post examines some more detailed issues around email and web addresses in GoldMine, and also shows how some create SQL queries can be used to address the problems.
Email and Web addresses in GoldMine
Unlike most other CRM systems (including Microsoft CRM), GoldMine stores contact email and web addresses in a separate table (CONTSUPP), in a 1 to many relationship – one contact can have many email and web addresses.
Microsoft CRM and most other CRM systems store each email and web address in a field in the account or contact entity. Microsoft CRM has three email addresses and one web address for each contact, for example.
This makes it difficult to migrate email and web; as each row is encountered in the GoldMine data, a decision has to be made to map it to email1, email2, or email 3 in Microsoft CRM.
A second challenge with GoldMine email and web is they may be in more than one field. They are stored in the CONTACT field in the CONTSUPP table; however, if they are too long to fit into that field (40 characters) then:
- email address are split between the CONTACT field and the ADDRESS1 field
- web addresses are instead stored in the NOTES field.
So when moving email and web addresses to another CRM system, there are two challenges: making sure the correct data is moved, and mapping from multiple rows of data to a single row with multiple fields.
