Chapter 22
In This Chapter
Understanding your migration options
Executing your migration plan
Organizing your data
Getting help
If you’re a system administrator, often your greatest headache isn’t configuring or customizing the system but getting your data in and maintaining it so that it’s useful. Nothing hurts a rollout more than complaints from users that their data isn’t in Salesforce, that information is duplicated in several records, or even worse, that the information is wrong. Your end user adoption suffers if you don’t maintain your records after the rollout. If you’re not diligent, you can find yourself in the same mess that drove you to Salesforce in the first place.
If data maintenance is giving you nightmares, use the data management tools in Salesforce to easily import leads, accounts, and contacts. If you have in-house expertise or engage a Salesforce partner, you can migrate other critical data (such as opportunities, cases, and activities) by using proven third-party tools. When your data is stored in Salesforce, you can rely on a variety of tools to help you manage and maintain your database.
In this chapter, we first discuss your options for data import. Then, we show you how to use Salesforce tools to manage your data (including mass-transferring, deleting, and reassigning data). Finally, we touch on advanced concepts, such as mass-transferring and mass-deleting your data. Complex data migration and updates of data between your data sources and Salesforce are beyond the scope of this book, but we make sure to point you in the right direction.
Salesforce has easy-to-use wizards that step you through importing your campaign updates, leads, accounts, contacts, and custom objects. If you’re a system administrator or have the right profile permissions, you can perform these tasks for your users. For other legacy data (such as opportunities, cases, and activities) that you want to have in Salesforce, you have to enter information manually or use the Data Loader, which is an included ETL (extract, transform, and load) tool that comes with Enterprise and Performance Editions to automatically migrate data into Salesforce. Professional and Group Edition users can enlist the help of salesforce.com professional services.
Import wizards for leads, accounts, contacts, solutions, and custom objects are conveniently located under the Data Management heading in the Administration Setup section of Setup. If you’re an administrator, you also see links to the import wizards in the Tools section of certain tab home pages. For example, if you want to import your company’s leads, click the Leads tab, and then click the Import Leads link in the Tools section. Steps and tips for each of the import wizards are detailed in relevant chapters of this book, as follows:
Data migration is a tricky matter. The Data Loader is a small client application that helps bulk-import or -export data in comma-separated value (.csv
) format. You access this tool by choosing Setup⇒Administer⇒Data Management⇒Data Loader. With this tool, you can move data into and out of any type of record in Salesforce, including opportunities and custom objects. The Data Loader supports inserting, updating, deleting, and extracting Salesforce records.
Several vendors also provide proven ETLs that enable you to migrate records to (or from) Salesforce and append those records where appropriate.
Without getting too technical, experts link data by using the Force.com API (application program interface) to enable your technical resource to access data programmatically. Force.com (http://developer.force.com) is the platform used to customize or integrate Salesforce to do even snazzier things than what you can do with it out of the box. And before you suffer from jargon overload, a platform is basically a collection of rules and commands that programmers can use to tell a program — Salesforce, in this case — to do certain things. To access the Force.com API, though, you must have Enterprise or Performance Edition.
During the preparation phase of your implementation, you need a well-thought-out and documented plan for your data migration strategy. That plan needs to include details on objectives, resources, contingencies, and timelines based on the different steps in your plan. In the following sections, we discuss some of the steps that you should consider.
The companies we’ve worked with typically have some type of existing contact management tool, a variety of spreadsheets with other customer data, and often, contact information living in users’ Microsoft Outlook applications (not to mention Word documents and sticky notes). As you go through your preparation, assess what and how much information needs to be in Salesforce. Here are some tips for this step:
Clean it now, or clean it later. Some project teams like to “scrub” data before importing it into Salesforce. Identifying and merging duplicates make finding the right record easier. Fixing inconsistencies in your data, such as ensuring that all State/Province fields hold two-character abbreviations, makes reports more accurate. If your legacy system doesn’t make cleanup easy, you might prefer to bring all the records into Salesforce first and then use the Salesforce data management tools to clean data later. Regardless of when you do it, cleaning data is not glamorous work, but it’s gotta be done.
Here are a few tips as you prepare your data:
Test before you execute the final migration. Often, you discover things that you missed or could improve. For example, fields can be mapped incorrectly, or you might just need to create some extra ones. Here are a couple of tips:
When your test data is in Salesforce, compare it carefully with your test file to ensure accuracy and completeness. Here are a few tips on how to productively analyze the test data results:
After you successfully analyze the test data results, you’re ready to import your file or files. (Yes, that’s a simplification of what could be a complicated set of tasks, but the overall process is tried and true.)
Here are a few suggestions for this step:
Similar to analyzing results of the test data (see the section “Analyzing the test data results,” earlier in this chapter), when the data has been loaded, run reports to validate a cross-sampling of records to ensure accuracy and completeness. If you can, compare screens in Salesforce with those of your legacy system. Make sure that data is stored in the correct fields and that values make sense. If you see an address in a phone field, you need to clean your data or fix your field mapping. Strive for perfectly imported data — but expect less than that, too.
Prior to rolling out Salesforce, take the extra step of manually or automatically updating some records to wow users and drive more success. When giving a demonstration or training, show users these fully entered examples and let them know the potential for Salesforce.
After you implement Salesforce, you need to make sure that you create processes for periodically updating and backing up your data. If you don’t, human error can lead to frustration and heartache. Duplicate records, dead leads, records that need to be transferred when a user leaves the company — these are just a few examples of data that needs to be updated.
Most of the data maintenance tools are accessible from the Data Management heading located under the Administrative Setup heading on the sidebar of Setup. (See Chapters 4, 5, and 9 for details on de-duplicating accounts, contacts, and leads.)
If you have Performance, Enterprise, or Professional Edition, Salesforce offers a weekly export service of all your data that you can use to create a backup.
To export and back up your data, follow these steps:
The Weekly Export Service page appears.
If you live in the United States or Western Europe, you don’t have to change the Export File Encoding selection.
The Weekly Export Service: Export Requested page appears. You’ll receive an e-mail from Salesforce with a link to a page where you can retrieve zipped .csv
files of all your data. You have 48 hours to download your data, after which time the data files are deleted.
The e-mail appears with a link to the page in which you can retrieve your data export. The file is only available for 48 hours, not indefinitely, so make sure you get the file from the link as soon as you can.
The Weekly Export Service page appears, as shown in Figure 22-1.
You can also access the Weekly Export Service page by choosing Setup⇒Application Setup⇒Data Management⇒Data Export.
A dialog box appears, allowing you to open or save your Zip file to a location accessible from your computer.
Although not required, we recommend that you schedule a routine data export of your data by clicking the Schedule Export button on the Weekly Export Service page (see Figure 22-1). This option follows the same steps as an immediate backup, but it also allows you to select when you want your backup to automatically occur.
A sales rep leaves. Sales territories get readjusted. You imported a file but forgot to assign records to the right owners in advance. These are just a few examples of when you might have to transfer records. Salesforce allows you to mass-transfer lead, account, and custom object records — and the processes for all three types are very similar.
When transferring leads or accounts, Salesforce automatically transfers certain linked records on the detail page.
To mass-transfer records, follow these steps:
A Mass Transfer Records page appears.
A Mass Transfer page appears with a set of filtering options to help you search for records. You can use the filters to specify the set of data that you want to transfer, for example, all Accounts with San Francisco in the Billing City field.
With leads, you can also transfer to or from queues. See Chapter 9 for details on lead queues.
You do this by selecting a field from the first drop-down list, selecting an operator from the second drop-down list, and then typing a value in the field. For example, if you want to transfer all of one sales rep’s New York City accounts to a new rep, your criteria would be
The Mass Transfer page reappears with a list of results.
The Mass Transfer page reappears when the transfer is complete.
If you’re the administrator, you might want or need to mass-delete records. A couple of typical examples include deleting dead leads and eliminating accounts that haven’t had any activity. Salesforce allows you to mass-delete leads, accounts, contacts, activities, cases, solutions, and products — and the processes are very similar.
To mass-delete records, follow these steps:
The Mass Delete Records page appears.
The Mass Delete Records page appears with a three- to five-step wizard for mass-deleting. The three-step wizard is shown in Figure 22-2. The Mass Delete Accounts page has two extra steps based on opportunities that are closed/won or that aren’t owned by you. The Mass Delete Products page has one extra step to archive products with line items on opportunities.
See Chapter 17 for details on building and exporting reports.
You do this by selecting a field from the first drop-down list, selecting an operator from the second drop-down list, and typing a value in the field.
You can see an example of this in the preceding section.
The Mass Delete page reappears with a list of possible records at the bottom of the page. Do the following:
If you’re mass-deleting accounts, you can do two things:
If you’re mass-deleting products, select the check box if you want to archive products with line items on opportunities.
If you’re mass-deleting another object, proceed to Step 7.
A dialog box appears to confirm the deletion.
The Mass Delete page reappears, minus the records that you deleted.
This chapter shows you some of the basic operations that you can perform to import and manage your data in Salesforce. For many companies that have complex data needs, this might be an oversimplification. If you need help with your data, here are some resources you can turn to: