Switching Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Data Migration Option

If your company is switching from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM – and there are plenty of excellent reasons to do so (but that’s another blog) – you want the best options for data conversion. Just ask a few salespeople whether they want their notes and documents to come over with the migration, and the answer will undoubtedly be “Absolutely!”

We recently had to solve this problem for a client moving from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. So our custom development team at The TM Group developed a Microsoft Dynamics CRM data migration framework tool that works like a charm.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM comes equipped with an abundance of built-in tools to import data that allow importing from Excel spreadsheets and other systems such as Salesforce.com. The out-of-the-box Dynamics CRM migration tools do an acceptable job of importing well-formed data such as account or contact name, address, phone and email. However, another solution may be required if the data is more complex or requires any type of manipulation before import.

The TM Group Offers Essential Microsoft Dynamics CRM Data Migration Option When Switching from Salesforce.com

For these more intricate cases, we developed a .NET code-based framework to create a Microsoft Dynamics CRM custom data import tool tailored to a specific data set.

Using this custom import tool, we can verify data, create complex relationships, and import additional items such as tasks, notes and documents. For example, the Salesforce.com import tool does a fine job of importing data; however, it does not import documents. Also, the assignment or reassignment of data elements to tasks and notes is rather multifaceted. For a recent client, we used our Dynamics CRM custom import tool to handle all the customer’s “special cases” and successfully import all the Salesforce.com data.

Once created, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM custom import tool allowed us to import data into a multi-org system supporting development, test and production environments. The data is imported into Microsoft Dynamics CRM through the Dynamics CRM web services API, allowing Dynamics CRM to enforce business logic and additional data validation.

The TM Group Microsoft Dynamics CRM data import framework allows us to handle complex, poorly formatted data by applying additional data processing in a custom application. In addition to Microsoft Dynamics CRM data migration, our custom integration framework can be combined with other code elements to import data into Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft SharePoint at the same time.

For more information about data migration options for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or to talk with someone on our custom development team for Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint and NetSuite ERP, and CRM solutions, please call 888.482.2864. Visit our website, http://www.tmgroupinc.com, for more information.

Authored by: Jennifer Swiderski, Marketing Manager for The TM Group, Inc.