We've launched the Goldmine Version of CRMMigrate.

It's been a painful process to develop the mapping - the format of data in Goldmine has to be seen to be believed, however we're now in a position to offer this migration service or licence.

CRM Migrate has been launched.

The tie up with QGate led to a period of testing and proving the product to ensure that it is reliable, useable and effective. We've now got to the point where we're the migration of data from Salesforce to Microsoft CRM is easy, and we're happy to sell the tool either as a managed migration or as a stand alone licence for the tool.

• The Managed migration involves QGate providing consultancy about the MS CRM installation, configuring the system to give the best MS Solution, and then using the CRM Migrate tool to move the data across.
• Buying the tool licence enables MS CRM distributors to deliver the consultancy, and to have a risk free way to migrate the data once they've setup the new systems.

Unless you're experienced with data migrations, you'll not realise how important the "Risk Free" part is when applied to a data migration. It's really common for systems to be set up really well, the project to run to schedule until the data has to be transferred across. The migration then either takes too long and removes all theprofit from the project, or is not done properly leading to client dissatisfaction or ongoing support calls.

We believe that CRM Migrate removes the risk - which is one of the barriers to changing systems.

Right, it's happened. I've given up on the DMM (Data Migration Manager).

I've been working on CRMMigrate, trying to coax my data and XML map into a format that the DMM will love, but it keeps failing. the main problems are:

• It won't handle the size of dataset that I need it to
• It isn't iterative - if it fails, it fails and the destination CRM system is half populated
• You don't know which half!
• It's pretty slow - as slow as using the web services yourself.

The solution semes to be to write my own process to send the data to MS CRM.

They always say that it's not what you know it's who you know.

I was chatting to a friend of a friend who works at Microsoft recently. I was talking about some work I was doing that grabbed data from SalesForce.com and stored it in a SQL server database. the grabbed his attention as he is involved in Microsoft CRM, and his boss is tasked with their compete strategy - helping microsoft sell CRM against other products.

A meeting was arranged so that I could demonstrate my data extraction tool, and then they were going to show me their "Data Migration Manager" (DMM). We'd see whether we could add the two together to create a migration strategy.

Preparation - the 5 Ps.

I was able to download the DMM and a virtual PC image with a version of MS CRM on it, which gave me a bit of a head start. With a bit of playing, I realised that the DMM used XML files to store the maps, and as SQL can describe itself pretty well I was able to modify my data extraction too so that it output a set of CSV files compatible with the DMM, and also an XML map.

The Meeting

The meeting went a bit like this. There was a fair amount of talk getting things started and positionsing everything, and then they asked me to show the extraction process.

It ran pretty smoothly, extracted all the data, and I was able to show it to them in query analyser.

We talked about getting the data out into CSVflils, and I pressed a button and said "you mean like this?" They seems pleased.

We then talked about DMM maps for the CSV files, and so I pressed a button and said "do you mean like this?" They seemed almost excited.

They then talked about the DMM process, and while they were doing so, I used the DMM to load the small test data set into their demo CRM instance.

Follow Up

Obviously, life is never that simple, and there are some compleixties that need to be sorted out - the fact that some relationships are more conveluted and that the source data structure may not match the destination, however we do have the basis for a product.