So after some poor experiences with the MSCRM Data Migration framework I decided to get pragmatic and write a C# app to do the migration.
The CDF is poorly documented at best, it seems they (Microsoft) give you a bunch of database tables, an Excel spreadsheet outlining the schema and a ‘Good Luck’. There is little ‘googleable’ (is that a word) knowledge about it either.
The good news was that the MSCRM SDK is much better documented (on MSDN). There is not a lot of googleable info around but there is enough (Stunnware proved pretty helpful for me).
There were other challenges also – the software we purchased for exporting the ACT! 2000 data to Access (Exporter Pro) did a good job of getting the data out of ACT but the Unique ID left a bit to be desired, they are basically a munge of punctuation characters and alphanumerics – what’s wrong with a GUID or a int ??
So, anyway, I got there in the end…
The connecting to the CrmService was pretty easy, as was the population and addition of an account.
crmSvc = new CrmService();
crmSvc.Url = MsCrmUrl;
crmSvc.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(CrmUsername, CrmPassword, CrmDomain);
account acct = new account();
acct.name = “company name”;
acct.address1_line1 = “address line one”;
acct.address1_line2 = “address line two”;
acct.address1_line3 = “address line three”;
// etc
Guid acctGuid = crmSvc.Create(acctGuid);
Simple as that – do it for each account…
Next installment will outline adding Contacts an then linking them to an account.