Microsoft CRM 4.0 data migration

Question

Hi,

I'm in the middle of a contract that is porting a company's hand-rolled Microsoft Access-based CRM to Microsoft CRM 4.0. It's all gone pretty well, but now I have to migrate the data across.

The data is all over the place in the source .mdb. Lots of tables, lots of duplication, and generally shows all the signs of an ad-hoc database which has grown organically (like weeds) over time.

So, my dilemma is this. Do I bite the bullet and write lots of queries inside Access to export the data into some intermediate format that CRM can somehow import? Or is there some other way? Are there any middleware tools that map data from one to the other that anyone here knows about?

Note this is my first time using CRM, so if the question is obvious, I appologise.

Cheers, Shane

Answer 1

Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides built in tool called Dynamics CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager to help developers migrate data from previous database into Dynamics CRM 4.0 database. I haven't used it extensively, but as far as i know, the previous data needs to be exported into a "standard" excel format provided by CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager (DMM).

You can refer to below references :

1. http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/01/04/microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0-data-migration-manager-with-john-o-donnell.aspx

2. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6766880a-da8f-4336-a278-9a5367eb79ca&displaylang=en

There is also 3rd party solutions called Scribe http://www.scribesoft.com/ that will help you migrate to Dynamics CRM 4.0 database

Answer 2

I've had success just using the mscrm api in these kinds of cases. You can write a .net app which use odbc to connect to your mdb then use the mscrm api to create the entities you need on that end.

Anyway you cut it - it's not too pretty but you can get the job done.

Good luck.

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