TeamBlog

As can be predicted, it hasn’t gone as smoothly as butter!

The product is performing as expected but it seems my 15 year old data is an issue. Apparently our data is not as clean as we thought. Seems that our upgrade after upgrade since 1991 has not been as clean structurally as the converter routines would like. Also, our data has been sliced and diced with every imaginable tool over the years.  I suspect that has a lot to do with it.

Ended up speaking with the support department. Found that there is indeed bad data in some of the fields. For example, “3/2/2″ in a field that should be like “08:00″ and so on. Small amounts but in this computer data world, one character incorrect is one-to-many.

So, we had to create short routines to clean up the data in the known bad fields. Not too bad just unexpected.

Next, the process moved into converting our GoldMine contact2 data. Oh now that was a bit more interesting as it was one of those not so obvious problems to resolve. The support person ran a manual process which was the same code from the converter and it worked without flaw. Nice, now we only have E-mail to deal with.

Ran that process separately using the wizard. Runs smoothly with only dialogs popping when our mailbox records have unrecognized/illegal characters in the database. This process is slow as it must move files according to the document management settings we had set during post-installation configuration. Seems to be ‘garbage’ data in the records once every few thousand records.

All in all, more time consuming than expected but then again, I expected that. After all it is computer data land!

Will continue answering dialogs on the bad paths and will report back. I now have 4 hours into the conversion – mostly waiting for conversions though. Could be doing other things – such as writing blogs.

PS. Suggested a new pre-convert test tool to the developer.  Is cleaning our data the programs responsibility?

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.