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Posts from the ‘Data Quality’ Category

Mar 2

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.

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Jun 4

Insights Presentation – Integration and Migration Projects

We have had a number of requests for a copy of the presentation made at Sage Insights in Nashville, May 2009.

The PowerPoint is here, and the PDF is here.

The focus of the presentation was issues in the management of integration projects, and a suite of tools that assist. In particular, there was discussion of version control mechanisms using the open source Subversion system as the main tool, with client UI provided by TortoiseSVN and server hosting provded by Assembla.

InaPlex strongly recommends using version control on projects because it provides a large measure of safety and control, and makes it much easier for groups towork together safely.

Inaport supports version control because profiles built are just XML files, which can be versioned safely.

If you have questions about using version control with projects, please do not hesitate to contact us.

May 17

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SQL for Data Quality

I gave a workshop on managerial and technical challenges of integration projects at Sage Insights in Nashville last week.

One of the areas I covered was some useful SQL queries for checking data integrity during a migration; the example used was from a Siebel to SageCRM migration project we are currently engaged in. I had a number of requests from audience members for details of the queries, so here they are.

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Apr 25

So you think you have data quality challenges?

One of the issues faced by most CRM systems is handling (preferably avoiding) duplicates. Inaport provides a range of different matching techniques to assist in avoiding duplicates when importing data.

This interesting article in the New York Times provides some insight into the difficulties faced in China. By some estimates, just 100 surnames cover 85% of China’s 1.3 billion citizens. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90% of American citizen’s.

Chinese citizens try to overcome some of the potential for confusion by creative use of the extensive Chinese character set of 55,000 characters. Unfortunately, this runs directly counter to the government’s efforts to computerize and standardise, with a set of “only” 32,252 characters. An even more restricted list of 8,000 approved characters is to be issued later this year. This is leading to situations where people cannot get identity cards issued, because the characters used in their name are not available in the government systems.

Inaport supports Unicode, so in principle can be used for matching against the full Chinese character set. However, I have to confess that (so far) we have not had to put this to the test, even though Inaport is currently being used by customers in Chine (and Japan). Should this happen, I’ll update the post with the results.

Regards

David