Convert / Migrate Goldmine Email History and documents to Dynamics CRM

We have noticed that a lot of Goldmine users are migrating to Dynamics CRM with the requirement to have the Goldmine History brought over in CRM.

While it is very easy to get the Company/Contact information from Goldmine to CRM, one of the sore points is bringing in Email history to CRM. You will find all of the Pending/Open activities of Goldmine in the Cal table and the Closed activities in Conthist table.

The Cal/Conthist table stores all the details of the activity like the date/time, the type, the owner etc of the activity. The Ref field stores the subject and the Notes stores the description of the activity. This is true for all types of activities except Emails.

In case of Email, the email body is stored not in the Notes of the Cal/Conthist but it is a separate table called “Mailbox” to store the email body. The RFC822 attribute of the Mailbox stores the actual content of the email body. “LinkRecid” is the attribute that will help you link the two tables.

The data in this field includes the email in HTML and plain text format and requires to be processed before they can be added as the Email body in CRM. To start with it would be a good idea to use the Regular Expression class (RegEx) to parse out all HTML elements from the email body. This is essential as the email body in HTML format sometimes contains the Style tags and script tags which may cause a problem when taken to CRM and also it would not appear well formatted. It is always a good idea to parse out all HTML elements and take the email body as plain text in CRM.

One more important point to remember is to parse out all newline characters like “\r” or “\n” from the email text. CRM email body accepts the message in HTML format so these can be replaced with the HTML newline tags like "<BR>".

If you want to identify the contact to which the email was sent or any activity is associated with, you can check for the (oc: ) tag in the activity ref attribute. This tag contains the name of the secondary contact with which the activity is associated.

Coming to email attachments. GM stores the physical file path in its table. During the migration process, you can look for the file at the given physical file path and write the attachment to CRM. This information can be found in the ContSupp table. So you can link the Conthist/Cal record with the ContSupp table to get the attachment file path.

Hope this helps in conversion of Email history of Goldmine and shows you the intricacies involved in doing this through development.

For those who would not like to reinvent the wheel there are a number of product migration utilities and services in the market by third party developers who can provide you with this already existing details including Inogic. Inogic has a unique way of approaching this migration where it has developed a migration tool for Goldmine that migrates Contacts/Pending/History/Emails/Attachments, Linked Documents to CRM and it provides this utility in a combination service by testing it with your Goldmine database and handholding you through your live migration and providing minor customization all at a FIXED COST to place your Goldmine data into Dynamics CRM.

You can check out further details of this on our website.