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.
Migrate GoldMine to Microsoft CRM 2011 – Part 1
There have been a number of requests from partners and customers for assistance on migrating GoldMine databases to Microsoft CRM 2011, both on premise and online.
InaPlex has many years of experience with GoldMine, with thousands of organizations around the world using Inaport for data import and integration with GoldMine. Inaport supports versions of GoldMine from 6.0 to current release.
InaPlex has a complete set of profiles available for migrating a standard GoldMine database to CRM 2011. This series of posts will walk through the process of doing such a migration.
- This first post covers preparation, and importing Account and Contact data
- The second post will cover importing Opportunities
- The third post will cover Pending, History and Email.
Migrate ACT! to Microsoft CRM 2011 Online – Part 1
There have been a number of requests from partners and customers for assistance on migrating ACT! databases to Microsoft CRM 2011, both on premise and online. InaPlex has a lot of experience with migrating ACT databases, as we developed the Sage Migrator product for Sage, which has been extensively used to migrate ACT and GoldMine databases to SageCRM and SalesLogix.
InaPlex has a complete set of profiles available for migrating a standard ACT! version 11 or 12 database to CRM 2011. This series of posts will walk through the process of doing such a migration.
- This first post covers preparation, and importing Account and Contact data
- The second post will cover importing Opportunities
- The third post will cover Activities and History.
Importing Leads into Microsoft CRM (and other CRM systems)
- Assign a quality score to each lead, allowing us to block low scoring leads, and rank the ones imported;
- Use better matching techniques to prevent duplicates being imported.
Building GoldMine Relationship Trees
The relationship trees in GoldMine are a potentially very useful feature. They allow you to set up a visual representation of the relationships between different contacts. You can, for example, show all the people that work for a particular company; or perhaps all the people from different organisations that are assisting on a particular project.
A problem with using relationship trees is that GoldMine offers very limited support for building them. The GoldMine wizard allows you to specify a single field to use as the basis for deciding if a contact should be in one tree or another. So you can build a tree based on the company name, which gets you all the contacts for that company. But what if you want to also sort the contacts by city or state? Or if you are looking for a more complex relationship between different types of contacts, such as brokers, properties, and prospective purchasers?
As soon as you need to consider more than one field, or want to do something slightly more complex, you are forced to build the trees manually.
Manually building trees is a difficult process for all but the smallest data sets. There are several problems:
1. The labor involved in building all the trees initially
2. Ensuring accuracy
3. Maintaining the trees once built, as records are added, updated or deleted.
As an earlier post noted, Inaport provides a relationship tree builder that addresses all these issues. It allows you to model simple or complex multi-level trees; once the model is built, you can build the tree and re-build at any time, or schedule the tree to be re-built regularly.
New video available
The relationship tree builder in Inaport has recently been updated, and a video describing and demonstrating its use is available here.
The video shows how to design and build a relationship tree showing the relationships between contact records for real estate properties, units within each property, and tenants in each unit. An example of the kind of tree than can be built is shown in the screen shot below.
Example Relationship Tree built using Inaport
Data Quality with Dr Peter Aiken
A couple of years ago, InaPlex did a joint presentation on Data Quality with Dr Peter Aiken of Data Blueprint (www.datablueprint.com). Dr Aiken is President of DAMA, associate professor of Information Systems at Virginia Commonwealth University, and founding director of Data Blueprint. More importantly, he is an interesing and very well informed speaker on the topics of data quality and data architecture.
Dr Aiken is running a series of talks on various topics; details on an upcoming talk below.
Topic: Data Modeling & Data Development
April 13, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST
This presentation provides an understanding of the data modeling/data development data management component. Participants will understand how the analysis, design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance of data solutions should be done in order to maximize the value of the enterprise data resources and activities. Architecting in quality is imperative at this level and complements a subset of project activities within the system development lifecycle (SDLC) focused on defining data requirements, designing the data solution components, and implementing these components. Participants will understand the difficulties organizations experience when interacting with a data development effort and how best to incorporate efforts into specific data projects.
Check the Data Blueprint website for more information and for a detailed schedule of upcoming training: www.data-ed.com
