This is the seventh and final article in a short series that is intended to explore the options available to a partner when moving a customer from an existing CRM or contact management system to Sage CRM on-premise.

In this article, I will consider the 3rd Party options and partner expertise available to customers and consider the different migration tools and services that can be used.

Sage CRM, especially when integrated to a Sage accounting system, can become an increasingly attractive option for a customer who is starting to get anxious about the escalating total cost of ownership of their existing system and the facilities that it offers for integration. Whatever the drivers that lead a customer to plan to migrate their legacy CRM system to Sage CRM, probably the most important "component" that will determine the success for the migration will be access to skilled partner knowledge.

A customer will need to be sure that their partner and own IT team can demonstrate

• thorough knowledge of each database system.
• accuracy and attention to detail.
• problem-solving capabilities.
• a methodical and logical approach project management.
• an understanding of data protection issues.

In my previous articles, I have described basic approaches to data migration based on the access we have to the source data

• Can the database be accessed directly?
• Is an API available? REST, SOAP or other - Does this cover all application data?
• We can access data via Exports

But migrating data allows us to consider the other matters. It can be a huge opportunity to address questions of data quality; a big job in itself that needs to be done before carrying out the migration. Data quality has to be paramount with the obvious need to make sure that referential integrity is maintained. That is both that child records where necessary have valid foreign key information and that parental records have whatever necessary child records associated with them.

If you are a partner helping several customers migrate then you may well be happy to create tools (scripts and routines) to help in the process but where you do not want to face reinventing the wheel, you may wish to consider using a tool created by a partner.

Tools that I know that have been used for data migration projects are

Starfish ETL http://www.starfishetl.com/crm-migration/migrating-to-sage-crm

and

Inaport https://www.inaplex.com/Solutions/CRM-Migration-Solutions

There are additional connectors such as Data2CRM available

https://www.data2crm.com/migration/crm/sage-crm-migration-service/

Other partners such as Greytrix (https://www.greytrix.com/), My CRM Manager (http://www.mycrmmanager.com), Azamba (https://www.azamba.com/) and Qmulus (http://www.qmulus-solutions.com/) offer data migration consultancy. This list is not exhaustive and I am sure you will want to suggest others in the comments below.

Sage CRM 2019 R2: Migrating to Sage CRM

1. Introduction
   • Starting to explore the options available to a partner when moving a customer from an existing CRM or contact management system to Sage CRM.
2. What are the typical types of older system? What is the typical database size and complexity?
   • Partners should understand the size of the problem and the opportunity. Getting a sense of typical system can help with planning especially when they may be several customers that need to be migrated and it is desirable to standardise the approach.
3. What are the options for extracting the data from a legacy CRM system?
   • This could range from a flat-file download to only API access.
4. What do we need to migrate?
   • Any project needs to consider its scope with time and resources available. For the migration of legacy data to Sage CRM, we need to take quite a cold hard look at what needs to be brought across whether that is Business Data, Documents, Custom Entities and Business Rules.
5. What are the data differences (structure, terminology etc) between the legacy system and a Sage CRM database?
   • We need to look at the differences in data structures and objects to understand the work that needs to be carried out to all the migration to succeed.
6. How will we maintain data integrity?
   • How will you maintain the integrity of data especially referential integrity as the data moves from one database to another? We want to be able to ensure that all communications, opportunities, notes etc all remain the children of the correct company and person entities and that no orphaned or widowed records are created.

7. What 3rd Party options and partner expertise is available?
   • This last article will look at the different migration tools and services that are available within the partner community.