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.

Overview

Before embarking on a migration project, it is important to have a look at your data, and how your current CRM system has become embedded (or not) in the work flows of your company.

Issues you may want to consider:

• Should all the data come across, or should this be an opportunity for a “spring clean”?
• What reports are being generated from the data, are they all necessary, can they be improved, how will they be generated in the new CRM system?
• Will you cut over quickly to the new system, or will you attempt to keep both systems running for a period? If the latter, will you need to keep the data in sync between the systems (hint: this can be difficult).
• If the old system was not being used well (there are no reports worth worrying about, a quick cut over is not going to be a problem), why not? And how is the new system going to fix it?

Your channel partner and InaPlex can advise on many of these types of issues; it is important that they be addressed before detailed planning for the migration, because it impacts how the data is brought across.

Preparation

Installation

Inaport can be installed on any system that has connectivity to the GoldMine database and attachments, and the Microsoft CRM system.

Microsoft CRM preparation

Before starting to import data from GoldMine, you will need to do at least two things in Microsoft CRM:

1. Create any required users. Inaport has the ability to map record ownership from GoldMine to Microsoft CRM, but the users must be created in CRM first.
2. Create any required custom fields. Areas to consider for custom fields include:
   The KEY1-5 fields in the CONTACT1 table; there are not obvious fields in the Contact entity in CRM for them.
   Other CONTACT1 fields to consider are MERGECODES and the PHONE Extension fields
   Contact2 UDEF fields.
3. If you want to migrate the Details tab data from GoldMine, you will need to decide if you need a custom entity in CRM to store the data.

GoldMine database preparation

You might also wish to spend some time considering how dirty your GoldMine data is, and how much data you wish to migrate.

Of particular interest is how companies and company names have been handled.  As you will be aware, GoldMine is a completely contact centric database. For example, we might have some contacts at InaPlex:

• Fred Smith, InaPlex
• Bill Jones, InaPlex
• Joe Blow, InaPlex Inc

During a migration, the standard maps will use the name of the company to match the account in MSCRM. If the name is not found, a new account is created and the contact placed under it. If the account name is matched, the contact is placed under the match.

The standard maps will normalize the company name, so “InaPlex” and “Inaplex, Inc” will match. However, the normalization process will not handle different names; for example, “InaPlex US” and “InaPlex UK” will not match.

This means that before running the import, you may want to validate and clean the company names in ACT.

It is possible to use other matching schemes – for example, you may have an account or company identifier in a KEY field; also, Inaport supports fuzzy matching that allows you to use string similarity scoring. If you want to use a different matching technique, contact your partner or Inaplex.

Connectors

After installation, the next step is to create connectors to the GoldMine database and Microsoft CRM. There are movies on the web site that show how to do this:

• create a connector for GoldMine
• create a connector for Microsoft CRM (on premise or on line)

Mapping Users

Inaport gives you the ability to establish a mapping between the users in GoldMine and the users in Microsoft CRM. This mapping is used by all the standard profiles to map the record ownership from GoldMine to MSCRM – i.e. a record that is owned by John Smith in GoldMine will be owned by John Smith in MSCRM, provided you establish the mapping. You can also map multiple GoldMine users to a single MSCRM user, to handle cases where the GoldMine user is no longer with the company, for example.

To establish a user map:

1. start Inaport
2. make sure the connectors have been created
3. go to Tools – User Map; select the GoldMine connector as the source and the MSCRM connector as the target, and click Get Users
4. select a user from the source column, a user from the target column, and Click ‘Add to map’

Importing Companies and Contacts

There are four standard profiles for importing companies and contacts:

1. 01_CompanyContact
   Import the company and contacts to accounts and contacts in MSCRM
2. 02_ContactEmail
   Update the contacts with the emails from GoldMine
3. 03_ContactWeb
   Update the contacts with web addresses from GoldMine
4. 04_AdditionalContacts
   Import the secondary contacts from GoldMine into main contacts in MSCRM
5. 05_AdditionalContact_Emails
   Import the email addresses for additional contacts

These profiles are designed to be run in order.

Secondary contacts are imported to the same account as their primary contact.