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.

The interaction history was sourced from 7 external agencies, with data being of varying degrees of quality. As a result of the data capture process, records associated with a single customer can span many years of communication both within and across each data feed. This data is cleansed and enhanced via an initial 5 stage process, after which an import tool is required to load the records into the Dynamics CRM database.

The import tool must inspect incoming records and search for a match within existing data records previously imported into the database. If a match is found then both records are merged. If no match is found a new record is created. Although an in house solution could have been developed, with time being of the essence, several existing products were assessed. Most vendors were discarded as they were found to update the CRM database tables directly. Inaport was selected as updates are performed via the Dynamics CRM API. In addition, Inaport provides enhanced matching functionality that goes beyond simple string matching.

The business team defined a key set of data fields that would establish the matching criteria. These data fields are Title, First Name, Surname, Postal Address, Email Address and Gender.

Inaport offers three principal modes of operation; Standard, SQL and Fuzzy matching. Standard matching builds an index of all data fields within the matching criteria. SQL matching uses a SQL statement, built from the matching criteria, to identify duplicate records. Fuzzy matching utilises ‘Fuzzy logic’ to build a match string consisting of the match data fields. This third mode allows for the matching of records against subtle variations in postal address e.g. 1a Station Road vs. 1/1 Station Road.

Inaport allows the fine tuning of the fuzzy matching via a confidence metric, to achieve the correct balance of matching.
A confidence measure of 100% does not tolerate any variation in characters between the match strings of the two records being compared and is equivalent to an exact string match. A confidence measure of 0% allows for any variation of characters and will result in two records being matched (incorrectly) every time. The recommended confidence measure of 95% allows a difference of one or two differing characters between the two match strings. It should be noted that the business did not approve the use of the email address field in the fuzzy logic match string as there is a higher degree of uncertainty as to whether these refer to the same person (i.e. “David Stewart david1@foo.com” and “David Stewart david2@foo.com”) .

Following a series of test runs, a combination of SQL and Fuzzy matching was determined to deliver the required results. Testing revealed that neither mode can handle NULL data within the match criteria. As none of the match fields are mandatory within the data capture process, an Inaport profile had to be created for each combination of match fields in order to handle the existence of NULL data. For the UK database, eleven profiles are created. For the International database, sixteen profiles are created. The first seven of the eleven UK profiles are SQL matching profiles that use a combination of the match fields to match and update the source records against existing consumers within the database. The eighth UK profile, the final match profile, is operated in Fuzzy Matching mode and the match string is built from Name and Postal address data fields. Following the match and update profiles, the final three profiles (2 x SQL and 1 x Fuzzy) are used to create any records that have not been matched to existing records within the database.

Instead of utilising the profile chaining functionality within Inaport, to automate the execution of the profiles, SSIS is used to instigate and track the progress of each profile. By wrapping the execution of the Inaport profiles within an SSIS package, the package is triggered on a weekly basis by a Scheduled Task on the server.

In terms of performance, each profile processes records at an average rate of 1 million records per day. The limitation in performance is not attributed to Inaport, but linked to the hardware hosting the Dynamics CRM API. The API needs to apply a series of business rules and security checks before updating the database. A notable performance improvement is experienced by using a checksum of the match fields within the profiles operating under SQL Matching mode. Additionally, the Estimated Execution Plan feature within SQL Management Studio has proven invaluable in recommending custom indexes to add to both the source and target tables.

In order to achieve a greater throughput of data, it is possible to run Inaport profiles in parallel. The source table is split in two and batches of 10,000 records are presented to separate instances of the SSIS package. The ability to run two sets of profiles in parallel allows the team to process 1.7 times as many records; compared with running a single instance of the package.
And so to the title of this post. The de-duplication capabilities of the product, Inaport, have led to the creation of a database that is focused on data quality rather than data quantity. It is clear the available modes of operation allow the team to automate the processing of millions of rows of data, while delivering a match success that strikes a balance between speed and an accuracy that is comparable to analysing each record with the human eye. The business sponsor is confident they now have a database with a single customer view of each customer that captures all inbound and outbound interaction.

The support from Inaport throughout the development process has played a significant contribution to the successful delivery of the project. Already the project team have started applying Inaport to scenarios never initially considered. I look forward to working with InaPlex in the future and continuing to discover new applications for the Inaport product.

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.

We have hundreds of users using our xRM (eXtensible Relationship Management – X meaning Anything) implementation of CRM 2011. One of the critical functions of CRM 2011we use is to send out automated emails, and track inside CRM replies to those emails. This part of CRM 2011 has occasionally quit functioning in the past. The repercussion of this failure is that a crucial communication link for these hundreds of users and their customers outside of our network was broken, and without a single error message being given, emails were queued up by the hundreds per hour waiting for the CRM Email Router to recover on its own or be restarted by a system administrator. Plus, our very expensive monitoring software seems to be incapable of detecting this kind of problem, and our operations team is way too busy to be able to frequently look for problems of this nature.

So we turned to InaPlex for some help. The question we posed, “Can Inaport be used to create a CRM email and send it?” was answered with a certain YES, which meant we were well on our way to being able to build a CRM active email probing system that looks like this:

1. An Inaport profile is run every half hour which creates and sends an email from CRM to an email address within our domain.
2. The Microsoft Exchange server receives the email and auto-replies back to the sending address.
3. A second Inaport profile is run a few minutes later that checks for the existence of the original email and the auto-reply.
1. If both are not found, Inaport sends an email to an Exchange distribution list notifying operations staff that the xRM Email system is not functioning properly.
2. If both emails are found, no message is sent, but it could be if that is the behavior we desired.

Absolutely not a line of code was written, nor were the Inaport profiles particularly complex to create.

Now, back to the canary …

The day after we had this system up and running, the second Inaport profile that is run to check for the existence of the emails did its job and reported that the CRM Email system had malfunctioned. Since it was still within the first 24 hours of operation of this new system, we chose to verify the problem by hand before contacting our operations staff. Sure enough, the CRM Email was not processing incoming emails, and emails were queuing up at a rapid rate. We contacted the operations staff, and while they worked the issue, Inaport continued to work and send an email every half hour that the CRM Email Router system was not functioning properly. 6 hours later, when the operations staff had discovered the problem and rectified it, and the Inaport generated emails stopped! We never touched the Inaport profile or stopped or started a job. It worked perfectly!

We were very pleased that our simplistic email test system had worked so well. And unlike the proverbial and practical canary in the coal mine that gives its life to warn of serious danger, our lInaport canary sings out loud and clear over and over until the CRM Email Router is functioning properly again.

This little Inaport-based CRM Email Router test system was all quiet for several weeks when it detected a different kind of problem. Four times in one day it reported that the outgoing probe had not succeeded. The next day  three same type failures occurred, and reports from users started to trickle in that they were experiencing errors. We looked at the CRM workflow jobs log and also noticed that the occasionally daily error had become a torrent of suspended workflows due to SQL Server errors. We reached out to our operations staff in charge of our hardware and their research showed that the SQL Server 2008 box was reporting lots of hardware level errors. They took corrective action on the hardware and the errors subsided on the various CRM fronts, and the Inaport canary went back to quietly working and waiting for its next chance to sing. Again, we never touched, turned on, turned off, or reset the Inaport profiles – it just performed flawlessly.

All of these troubles spread out over weeks did not raise a peep from our sophisticated and very expensive monitoring software; the little Inaport-based system has proved to be our most accurate and most dependable monitor so far.

We are very impressed with Inaport. That we could use it to build a very simple and reliable monitor of a critical CRM 2011 function, the CRM Email Router, and that it also has been invaluable in migration and integrating data from and to our other applications are just a couple of examples of what a great tool it is. We look forward to making other discoveries of its quality and usefulness.

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.

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.

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.

Using a Pivot in SQL

The solution to this conundrum is using a ‘pivot’ in SQL. Pivoting is the process of translating rows of data into a single row with multiple columns:

email1  }

email2  }                  ====>          email1   email2   email3

email3  }

Pivoting data is a multi-step process:

1. work out how to group the rows that will be turned into a single row
2. find a unique identifier for each row in the group that can be used for the pivot
3. build  a select statement based on a group that collects the rows into a single row.

In GoldMine, the rows with the individual email or web addresses all belong to the same contact,  and have the same ACCOUNTNO field – we can use that as the group.

select accountno, ...

group by accountno

The unique identifier is a bit more difficult – there is nothing int he GoldMine data that identifies email 1, email 2 etc. The solution is to use the row_number() function in SQL, which generates a row number for each row:

row_number() over(partition by accountno order by contsupref) as rowno

The row_numner() function generates a new row number for each row in the group of rows defined by the partition().

The third problem faced is the email being potentially split across two fields. This is solved using a CASE, like this:

case
	when ADDRESS1 is null then contsupref
	when ADDRESS1 is not null  then contsupref + address1
end as email

The case statement selects the CONTSUPREF field when ADDRESS1 is null, or combines CONTSUPREF and ADDRESS1 if necessary.

A Pivot Query for email addresses

Putting it all together gives us a SELECT query that produces a single row for each distinct accountno vale, along with up to three email addresses that belong to that accountno:

select accountno,
	MAX(case when rowno = 1 then email end) as email1,
	MAX(case when rowno = 2 then email end) as email2,
	MAX(case when rowno = 3 then email end) as email3
from
	(select accountno, row_number() over(partition by accountno order by contsupref) as rowno,
		case
			when ADDRESS1 is null then CONTSUPREF
			when ADDRESS1 is not null  then contsupref + address1
		end as email
	  from CONTSUPP where CONTACT = 'E-mail Address'
	) as e
group by accountno

Using the Pivot Query to get real data

Finally, that query can be used in a left outer join with a SELECT on CONTACT1 to get the main contact data, and all the associated email addresses:

select c1.accountno, company, CONTACT, e.email1, e.email2, e.email3
  from CONTACT1 c1 left outer join
    (
      select accountno,
        MAX(case when rowno = 1 then email end) as email1,
        MAX(case when rowno = 2 then email end) as email2,
        MAX(case when rowno = 3 then email end) as email3
	from
	  (select accountno,
                  row_number() over(partition by accountno order by contsupref) as rowno,
		  case
		    when ADDRESS1 is null then CONTSUPREF
		    when ADDRESS1 is not null  then contsupref + address1
		  end as email
	     from CONTSUPP where CONTACT = 'E-mail Address'
	  ) as e2
	group by accountno
    ) as e
    on c1.ACCOUNTNO = e.ACCOUNTNO

To summarize:

1. The innermost select (as e2) gives use a row for each email address, with a row number and the email data correctly formatted
2. The second select (as e) gives us an intermediate table with the email addresses for each accountno in a single row
3. This is then left outer joined to the main select, which is being used to get the main contact data from CONTACT1.

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.

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.

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

Because Inaport uses the ACT API, it needs to be installed on a system that has ACT installed. In addition, you need to make sure that you select the version of Inaport built for your ACT version. See the Inaport Download page for details.

Microsoft CRM preparation

Before starting to import data from ACT, 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 ACT to Microsoft CRM, but the users must be created in CRM first.
2. Create any required custom fields. If you have created custom fields in the ACT database, and you wish to import that data into CRM, you will need to create corresponding fields in CRM.

ACT database preparation

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

Of particular interest is how companies and company names have been handled in the ACT data. Many ACT databases are based on contacts only. Even in databases that use companies, many contacts may not be linked to a company. This is handled by:

1. importing companies from ACT to MSCRM, and storing the company ID from ACT,
2. then importing contacts. If they are linked to a company, they are linked to the same account in MSCRM. If they are not linked to  a company, then the company name in ACT is used to try and identify the correct account in MSCRM.

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

Connectors

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

• create a connector for ACT
• 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 ACT and the users in Microsoft CRM. This mapping is used by all the standard profiles to map the record ownership from ACT to MSCRM – i.e. a record that is owned by John Smith in ACT will be owned by John Smith in MSCRM, provided you establish the mapping. You can also map multiple ACT users to a single MSCRM user, to handle cases where the ACT 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 ACT 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_Company
   Import the company entities from ACT to accounts in MSCRM
2. 02_Contact_with_Company
   Import contacts that are linked to a company in ACT into contacts in MSCRM
3. 03_Contact_NO_Company
   Import contacts that are NOT linked to a company in ACT
4. 04_Secondary_Contacts
   Import the secondary contacts from ACT into main contacts in MSCRM

These profiles are designed to be run in order, but if there are no companies in ACT you can skip 01 and 02.

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

A Word about Matching

As noted above, contacts with no company are associated with an account in Microsoft CRM by matching on the company name. By default, the profiles will normalize to company name for matching; this means punctuation and excess spaces are removed, noise words (Inc, Incorporated, LLC, Ltd, Limited, gmbh, sarl, …) are removed, and the result is lower cased.  See screen shot below for an example:

Normalise company name for match

Using name normalisation, “Inaplex Inc” and “InaPlex” will match, but “InnerPlex” and “Inaplex” will not.If you need to handle mis-spelling of company names as well, Inaport has fuzzy match capabilities available – for example, “InaPlex” and “InnerPlex” are an 87% match.

If a contact has no company name, then by default it is imported to an account called “No Company”. This can of course be changed.

Inaport provides the capability to automatically create a new attribute on each entity: “ip_importid”. This is used to store the unique identifier of each record imported from ACT – for example, the Company ID or the Contact ID. This is then sued in subsequent profiles to identify the correct Account or Contact to associate child records with – for example History or Activity.

• 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.

Importing Leads using Microsoft CRM

Sample data for import into Microsoft CRM Leads

Sample lead data imported into Microsoft CRM

1. “Fred Smith” is obviously duplicated, even though duplicate detection rules were in place.
2. The names are not formatted well.
3. Row 3 “asasa” is poor quality, and probably should not have been imported.

Importing leads using Inaport

Use any data source

• The file type can only be .csv, .txt or .xml
• Maximum file size is 8Mb.
• Each file can only be mapped to a single entity in Microsoft CRM.

1. RowID, a unique number for each row
2. LeadScore, which will hold a lead quality score calculated by Inaport
3. IsImported, which will hold the unique identifier of the lead in Microsoft CRM once imported.

Lead source data with added columns

Lead Quality Scoring

1. Assign a perfect score (50 in our example).
2. use a set of rules to deduct points from the lead; each rule can be used to deduct one or more points

Lead scoring rules

• The first checks if the lead has a blank email address, Last Name, or Business Phone number. If so, 10 points are deducted.
• Rule 3 checks if the phone number has the same digit repeated 4 more times (e.g. “1111234″ or “1234444″), while rule 4 checks if the phone number has “1234″ or 2345″ or “7890″. In each case, points are deducted.
• Rules 5 and 6 check the email address, deducting points if it is from gmail or yahoo, and more points if the first part of the email is 1 to 4 characters long and it is from gmail or yahoo (e.g. abcd@gmail.com)

Lead data score results

1. Update the source spreadsheet with the quality score for each record.
2. Prevent importing records which score below some cut off level.

Updating the source spredsheet with a score

Improved Matching

• remove noise words such as “Inc”, “incorporated,”, “llc”, “Ltd”, “GmbH”, “sarl”, …
• remove punctuation and trim white space
• lower case everything.

Inaport Match Criteria

Updating the Source with Import Results

1. It is a positive indicator that the record has been imported, meaning if a manual review is done the record can be skipped.
2. If the source record is updated for some reason, Inaport can be used to update the lead in Microsoft CRM.

Update source with Microsoft CRM lead ID

Results of the Import

Inaport lead import into Microsoft CRM

• Fred Smith” has not been duplicated;
• The poor quality record “asasa” has not been imported;
• The names are formatted correctly;
• Most importantly, the lead quality score is available in Microsoft CRM.

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

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