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Mar 10

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

Feb 3

Sage CRM Solutions Switch and Save Program

Sage CRM Solutions have recently announced “Switch and Save”, a competitive replacement program. It is designed to incentivize customers on competitive products to migrate to Sage SalesLogix or SageCRM. The program runs from January 4, 2010 to March 31, 2010.

The offer will include the Easy Pay Option and deep discounting on license, maintenance and support, as well as a rebate to help subsidize the migration. Highlights include:

  • 60% off MSRP of Sage SalesLogix and SageCRM for switching from a competing software product (including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce.com, and GoldMine)
  • Discounted maintenance for 2 years
  • 10% rebate on conversion and migration services

InaPlex is one of the most experienced migration practitioners available. Inaport and Sage Migrator have been used for hundreds of migrations, and InaPlex Professional Services and our channel partners have assisted customers with simple through to complex migrations, such as:

  • Two Siebel CRM databases to a single SageCRM system
  • Microsoft Dynamics to SageCRM.com
  • Many GoldMine and ACT! migrations to SalesLogix and SageCRM
  • SalesLogix to SageCRM and vice versa

Whatever your migration requirements, it is likely that InaPlex will be able to provide the tool set to let you do it, backed by training and professional services that can range from an hour of project guidance through to a turn key migration of all your data.

Please contact info@inaplex.com for further information, or visit our web site.

Jan 29

Unicode nearing 50% of the web

A quick follow up to the last post (Fun with Unicode); saw a post on the Google blog, saying that nearly 50% of all web pages are now using Unicode encoding. They also make some interesting comments about the impact on search terms and their indexing.

Read more here.

Jan 24

Fun with Unicode

InaPlex has put considerable effort into ensuring that Inaport has full support for Unicode; Inaport is used in most European and many Asian countries, and good character set support is essential for our customers.

We were therefore quite surprised when a customer complained that it was not handling Chinese characters; worse, they had a screen shot demonstrating it:       

Chinese characters not displayed
Chinese characters not displayed

 

The source file is a tab delimited text file with a mixture of European and Chinese characters, all in Unicode. As you can see from the screen shot, there is a problem of some sort with the “City” column.     This lead to head scratching and debugging activity, until finally the penny dropped.      Read more

Jan 16

Cross database queries – or, how to rescue a bad database

Even InaPlex gets it wrong occassionally.

It was late, we were tired, instructions from the client were not clarified properly… and the database was not backed up before a SQL update was issued that created some real problems. The SQL update modified the primary userid of most of the account records in the CRM system.

Of course, the problems were not discovered until the next morning – second last day of the financial year for the client, and the sales people could not see all their accounts in the CRM system because they no longer had appropriate permissions.

The project manager at the client was very polite, but was clearly under substantial pressure to get it fixed.

But the database was live, had been modified, and the most recent backup was a few days old. Rolling back to the backup was out of the question, continuing with the current system was impossible for the sales people.

All in all, not a good situation.

Read more

Sep 5

Regular Expression resources

Anybody who has attended an Inaport demonstration or training course will know that I am a big fan of regular expressions. For those that have not, here are the highlights:

Read more

Aug 26

1 Comment

Inaport versus Scribe Workbench

Normally we would not mention a competitive product, but with the release of Inaport for Dynamics CRM a common question is “why use Inaport instead of Scribe Workbench”.

This is a fair question, because Scribe is probably the incumbent player for import/migration/integration projects with Dynamics CRM.

(I might parenthetically point out that a few years ago Scribe Workbench was the incumbent for Sage SalesLogix; now InaPlex is a Sage Endorsed Development Partner, and Inaport is the only endorsed integration product for SalesLogix.)

One obvious answer to the question is pricing. Inaport starts at $450 for an entry level 30 day license through to $3,495 for the unrestricted Professional Edition; there are no seat count restrictions, and no limit on the number of systems it can be installed on. This makes it very competitive against Scribe Workbench, which is $3,995 (server) + $1,295 (adapter) + $995 (user pack) = $6,285.

However, the British have a saying “penny wise, pound foolish”; the American equivalent is “you get what you pay for”. It would be short sighted to save a few thousand dollars on the software, to later discover that either it cannot get the job done or it adds significant time and complexity to the project. Integration projects are already tough enough without also battling your tools.

Read more

Aug 21

Inaport for Microsoft Dynamics CRM released

Inaport for Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been released.

This build has full support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.x, both on-premise and hosted, and can be used to:

  • import into any entity or set of entities, with full matching (including fuzzy matching)
  • migrate legacy systems such as ACT! or GoldMine
  • integrate with other enterprise systems such as Accounting or ERP

The adapter supports advanced features such as:

  • run SQL queries against the Dynamics system during import;
  • populate pick list fields from incoming values if not already there;
  • optionally, automatically add a field to entities for storing an import id for matching.

Of course, the complete set of Inaport features are available: automation, logging, error handling, preview of data before import, and many more.

Read more

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

1 Comment

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.

Read more

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