CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We are currently using eTapestry for our donor database and would like to dump that for CiviCRM. We are using CiviCRM as a Drupal module but only for our contacts and such. eTapestry can give us a export on DVD and they explained it as such:

“We do a Constituent Everything export which puts everything into one file; or an Export into excel with two files-one for accounts and one for journals.”

“Further, is there a format you want to receive them in to import to a new database?”

Does anyone have any experience with going from eTapestry to CiviCRM? Which file format should we choose? We are also looking to hire a consultant to help out with this as we obviously want to get this done properly.

Any advice is appreciated.

Hi Leupi,

I'm just wrapping up an eTapestry to CiviCRM migration - when it launches, I'm going to post my notes from the job.  However, I'm happy to share my raw notes with you if you like.  I may also be available for consulting, depending on your timeline - you can contact me at jon at palantetech dot com for either or both.

In the meantime - definitely get separate files for Journals and Accounts!  Also be prepared for some sloppiness on eTap's part with their export parser.  For instance, commas in custom field names aren't escaped properly in CSV files.  All your e-mail addresses will be in one field instead of broken out.  I imported their data into MySQL and wrote a bunch of SQL to parse it out, which I can share with you - though after CiviCon, if I had to do it again (and I'm sure I will) I'd probably try to use an ETL tool like Talend or Pentaho.