Migrating to Salesforce - Clean Now or Later?
Monday, July 27, 2009
I was just talking to a larger sized prospect moving from Onyx CRM to Salesforce. They had a question that we get often here at CRMfusion Inc. but I have never got around to putting my thoughts on paper about it.
During a migration to Salesforce should I clean (particularly deduplicate) before I load the data into Salesforce or after?
Most organizations assume to clean before, initially.
Although we have tools that could aid in finding duplicates in non Salesforce systems (check out EzDeDupe) our recommendation to clients has always been to migrate the data BEFORE cleansing and then after data table migration use DemandTools to find the duplicates and MERGE them using the Salesforce data centers natural merge capabilities (a hard wired merge that is perfect)
My top three reasons for this are as follows:
1) Pre-cleaning sounds all fine and dandy but in what environment are you going to do it in? You will need to introduce a "middle ground" database, maybe SQL or whatever but you still are introducing a 3rd system.
2) Migrating the data in its current form will allow you to easily verify record counts that were migrated and possibly even run parallel for a time while you ensure migration is complete and accurate.
3) If you merge records in the middle ground database you have to remember the multi-table structure and how to put all the sub-objects in the right place, not a simple task even for an experienced DBA.
Take advantage of the infrastructure that the data center provides for you, merging is a very important feature.
Hope everyone is having a good summer.
Mark
posted by Mark Esdale @ 3:26 PM,
