Migrating Notes/History from ACT! to SugarCRM

[fuel37]

Hi Folks,

We're currently in the process of migrating from a terminal server/act! setup to Sugar. We've got the contacts migration pretty well covered but, we're having trouble figure out the best way to move our notes/history from act to sugar. We basically use the notes/history in act to record everything we know about our clients so, it's a huge deal for us to get them moved over. We have approx. 22,000 contacts in our database so, it's not huge by any means but, I don't want to have to manually move them over.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
TJ

[mygr8r]

Pervasive DataTools (http://pervasivedatatools.com) offers solutions for migrating data from ACT to SugarCRM.

If you have the ACT application, you can create reports that contain both the parent (Contact) and child (Notes/History) records. Then, print the report to a file on your workstation - rather than to a printer - and download the Data Extractor for Unstructured Text to extract the records, with relationships intact, as needed. Export the data records to a CSV file from the Data Extractor.

Then use the Data Builder for SugarCRM to map and transform the "raw" CSV data into the exact CSV structure that is ready to import into SugarCRM using the SugarCRM import utility.

Good luck!

-mygr8r

[cerhorn]

I have converted more than 10 ACT databases recently, and found a method on the Sugar Wiki that works just fine.

I used Crystal to export my note history to a spreadsheet, then followed the instructions on the Wiki. No need for any additional tools, just Excel and the Sugar import / export functions.

Here's the link:

http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.p...mporting_Notes

[chander]

I'm actually just finishing doing this now, here is what I did:

1. Connect to the SQL database that act runs via PHP (use the instructions here http://simonmlarsen.googlepages.com/act7onsql)
2. Determine field mappings from ACT to Sugar (basically, just determine how the fields in one relate to the fields in another...and also the relationships...for example, phone numbers are a separate table in act...they are not in Sugar).
3. Use PHP to connect to the MSSQL database and extract the data, and the SOAP API to import the data into sugar.

The SOAP API is kind of slow, but it works fairly well.. Once I process about 100 records, PHP runs out of memory (apparently another NuSoap Issue), so I just save where I'm at with each record I process and then re-start at that record when it crashes.

I installed the Tag module, since we make use of groups in ACT, and had to modify it slightly so that I could establish relationships via the SOAP API.

With SOAP you can import everything, contacts, attachments, email, call history, etc. fairly easily.

No third party or commercial tools required, but the mappings themselves take some time to setup....especially since we have a lot of customization that we've done to ACT here.

[falcorustico]

If you're doing the mapping of the Act tables, would you be able to share your notes/findings on the relationships and your export/import scripts?

We've done extensive customization to Act too - and that's been holding us back from the migration.

Your work would be very helpful and would certainly help shortcut the process.
Are you willing to share your findings?

Thanks
Robert Falcone