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Sep 28

Inaport 7.3 Released

InaPlex is pleased and proud to announce that version 7.3 has just been released to the web site for free download.

The product of thousands of development hours and working with InaPlex customers around the world, 7.3 continues the tradition of maintaining compatibility while enhancing and extending functionality.

Said Steven Neil of Grand Canyon University:

“We have been using Inaport extensively for a couple of years. The new release continues the process of enhancing and deepening functionality, while not loosing sight of usability and manageability that are Inaport trademarks.”

We will expand on the new functionality in a series of blog posts, but in brief:

  • Extend: execute external applications, write your own code
  • Enhance: new ways to integrate with your external systems during a job
  • Compatibility: Microsoft CRM 2011 including integrated with Office 365; SageCRM 7.1 on premise and on line; ACT 2012; SalesLogix 7.x
  • Attention to detail: hundreds of performance enhancements, bug fixes, and tweaks to the user interface

Download the latest build from our web site: http://www.inaplex.com.

 

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.

Read more

Feb 5

Microsoft CRM – Moving Views Between Development and Production With Inaport

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.

Read more

Nov 6

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.

Read more

Oct 19

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.

Read more

Oct 1

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.

Sep 22

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.

Apr 28

2 Comments

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.
Read more

Mar 28

3 Comments

Importing Leads into Microsoft CRM (and other CRM systems)

This post demonstrates importing leads, an important first step in the sales process for many (most?) organisations. Leads can be gathered from many sources, which can lead to multiple problems such as poor quality data and duplicates.

Inaport can be used to:
  • 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.
While this post uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 as the target CRM system, the principles discussed can be used with Sage SalesLogix, SageCRM, ACT! by Sage, and GoldMine.

Read more

Feb 16

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

Example Relationship Tree built using Inaport

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