Imports -- BCM 2007 Beta

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
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Guest

I've managed to import approx 11,000 accounts and 20,000 contact records
into BCM from Goldmine 6.7 using Access 2003.

Have run into a few issues that I could sure use some advise on.

1. There appears to be some "auto-magic" updates that occur if the data is
entered by a user. For example ... when searching for an account using the
UI, those contacts that were manually entered appear followed by the account
in parentheses. These that I imported do not, unless I view the contact using
the UI and save it.

Re-indexing does not solve the issue.

Any ideas on how to resolve?

2. There appears to be no methods provided for a intermediate level hacker
to import activities, quotes, document links, or tasks.

Is this an oversight?
Am I missing something?

Any suggestions?

3. Similarly, there appears to no tools to provide for bulk "updates" to
data. It does appear that the .bcm files are a possibilty for both this and
the prior issue. Is there a good tool for exporting from Access or Excel to
a BCM compatable XML?

TIA
 
Imports create Account s and Contacts through the Outlook object model,
so I suspect this feature (Contacts with Accounts in parantheses) is
something the BCM forms do when they save Contacts. Outlook itself
doesn't know about the Account-Contact relationship. Are you using the
Tools|Find|Advanced Find for these searches?

The only ways to import history is via BCM files, or writing the data
directly to the database. If you need to regularly import data from
Goldmine, it may be worth the time and effort to right a utility to
generate XML or SQL to get the history items into BCM. I've done both
in the past, but that was for very specific data, and I'm not aware of
any generic utilities for generating BCM XML. A few years ago there was
a program that generated XML from ACT!, Goldmine, and QuickBooks, which
could then be transformed to BCM XML with XSLT, but that company is
gone. I suspect the BCM import utility does something like that because
it has a directory with XSL files. The SQL is a little trickier to
generate correctly because you need to insert more data (e.g. item and
relationship Ids) and you'll need to find the Ids of the history items'
parent accounts. With the XML, if the parent's name matches one in the
database, the import will make the connection and add or merge the
history items to the right parent. You can export to BCM files to see
what the required XML should look like.
 
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