Well, it's been a while since I've blogged. It's not that there hasn't been anything to blog, there's been plenty. But I've been busy, and a bit lazy.
Recently I've been burning the mid-night oil working on migrating data from GoldMine to CRM. This has been a big road block for me so I decided to try to bust through it. I know that Scribe Software has a great product and comes highly recommended. But, it's a 45 day license for about $500. That's OK as most times once you've migrated, you've migrated. The kicker for me as a sole practioner is the $1,200 fee to join their dealer program plus the training. The training is a good thing but even if it's included in the $1,200, would require travel and time away from billable hours.
Microsoft has included a tool for migrating from various other systems to CRM, including GoldMine. I figured, as an MVP, I at least ought to try to learn this. I can always move to Scribe if need be. The tool is Data Migration Framework and can be downloaded from here. The tool comes with some spreadsheets for a few systems including GoldMine. These spreadsheets outline where the data is in these systems. This is nice. the DMF walks you through a process to migrate data. However, the most important step, populating the intermediate database, cdf_mscrm, is pretty much left up to the user. To populate this, one uses SQL Data Transformation Services, DTS. To do so, one must be well versed in DTS. The DMF gives no guidance here. I Googled for info on DMF and GoldMine and found little to no useful information. Even the CRM 'back channel' did not respond to my requests for assistance and guidance. I did find ONE posting however that was my salvation. This was a procedure written for migrating GoldMine to CRM 1.2 back in 2005. It is really quite a good tutorial and procedure for the process. He includes very detailed instructions and rationale for each step in the process. Of course I did have to make some adjustments for 3.0 and to account for doing it on my systems as opposed to his data. This wonderful post has the unlikely title of Scurvy Jake's Pirate Blog (rated arrrrrrrrrrrr)! The posting I used is http://bogomip.net/blog/migrating-goldmine-to-microsoft-crm/.
I am still working through the process and trying to smooth out the rough edges. But the basic migration appears to work. I will blog more and probably write an article once I've gotten it down a bit better, and successfully migrated my client's GoldMine to CRM.