CRM 3.0 - Migration Options for ACT!, GoldMine, and SalesForce.com
During the Fort Worth TS2 Seminar on Tuesday the 16th, Andrea brought up several great questions regarding the migration of customers on other products such as ACT!, Goldmine, and SalesForce.com to CRM v. 3.0. The concern is that once they sell the customer on the idea of switching to CRM, they don't have a good option to get all of their customer data out of the other programs. I'd did some research during the day today both internally at Microsoft as well as in the CRM Communities, and other sites to find out what options we had to offer.
There is a Microsoft solution that will do a lot of this work for you (Data Migration Framework), but the updated version isn't out for CRM 3.0 and from what I've heard, the 1.2 version had a lot of room for improvement. I spoke to one of my collegues regarding the options for migration now since our tools weren't out yet and he didn't hesitate to plug Scribe Software's two products, Scribe Insight and the Scribe adapter for CRM 3.0. I spent an hour or so on their site reviewing the literature they had available and some customer testimonials that were publicly available. If it does what they say it does, it should be well worth the money. I emailed Larry Lentz, our CRM MVP in San Antonio to find out what exposure he's had with the Scribe applications and he said that he hasn't put them to use yet, but Will Hadley from TIP Technology Integration Providers, LLC in Plano, Texas has recently subscribed to them. I've emailed Will and I'm hoping to chat with him sometime this week to see if I can get some feedback on the tools from a trusted source.
Some people will complain about the price for the tools, but they need to look at it from a different perspective. If they can cut a 6 week migration in half or beter by using these tools, its well worth it to the customer in the long run because the applicatoin cost is cheaper than the other 80-120 hours of labor that they would incur if they didn't use the tools. For more information on the applications that Scribe has to offer, check out the datasheets or go to their website at http://www.scribesoft.com
There were other questions around the workflow processes in CRM 3.0 that I will address in another post.
Stay tuned....