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.
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