CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I need to do a one-time move of Contacts from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to CiviCRM.
I certainly know I can do this.
It would also be nice to preserve Creation Date, Modification Date, Notes, and Owners or Business Units (for grouping purposes) from MS CRM in the process as well.
Does anyone have some details or links on best practices on how to do so?

Some options:
- Export MS CRM to CSV, use CiviCRM import.
- Export MS CRM to CSV, write custom code to load.
- Use CiviMigrate?

Thanks,

-dave

Good question. I have about 55,000 Contacts in MS CRM.

Because of a business decision, the number of contacts has been trimmed down to 17,000.

I've written a reasonable SQL Server T-SQL query to generate the Contacts as a CSV file. (I've put off dealing with the Notes for the moment.)
I was planning on using CiviCRM's Import facility to import the data.
I think I have to do some investigation to figure out how to get it to import text fields that have embedded commas (field separator).
My initial experiment tells me, it doesn't support regular text fields (which may or may not contain the comma field separator) surrounded by double quotes in CSV files.

As a work-around, I can export MS CRM as pipe delimited text instead.

-dave

@Dave (too many daves in that thread

I'd suggest you to write a custom script using the api, it will make it way easier to test, re-run if there is a crash, add custom validation rules and all the business rules you will have to deal with (the kind "if column 3 is not empty uses it as the main phone", otherwise take the phone from the organisation unless this and that...)

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