Hi, everyone. I'm new here but I'm hoping someone can help me with a problem I'm encountering. I'm in the process of teaching myself CRM, with an eye towards a career change to support and implementation, and I'm being mentored by my brother-in-law, who runs his own MS Partner company that specializes in business software solutions and support. As a training exercise/learning experience, he's asked that I handle the long overdue transfer of their customer accounts from their current system (Goldmine 5.0) to CRM. The majority of the process is going smoothly so far, except for one major stumbling block that I can't seem to find a way around for the life of me.
In Goldmine, there's a Notes tab for each account, consisting of one large field (limit of 64k characters) composed of individual, auto stamped with user ID and date/time, text entries inserted on a new blank line as they are created by the user. The Notes tab was intended to be used for brief notes pertaining to the overall account – such as if you'd heard a report that the client company was in financial trouble, or that the particular client needed to be handled carefully because of a previous problem that nearly lost their business, entries like that.
Unfortunately, the employees have long been using it like a journaling system instead - creating incredibly long strings of entries for each account detailing things like basic, everyday phone calls to the client, etc. Because of the now excessively cluttered nature of this tab for each record, every single attempt to export the data in preparation for transfer to CRM results in a corrupted spreadsheet where the text from the Notes column no longer remains aligned on the proper row with the company it was exported from, overflows outside its own columns entirely, etc.
Since this data represents critical account history, it's been decided that it cannot be left behind and must be part of the transfer to CRM. As there are literally hundreds of customer accounts involved, I do NOT want to have to end up manually transferring the Notes data via copying and pasting but I'm at a loss as to what else to try. As I mentioned before, I'm a novice to the IT world, but I am fairly computer savvy and I can usually pick new things up pretty quickly. If anyone more experienced in Goldmine/CRM than I (no doubt ALL of you!) has any recommendations or tips they can share, or who has experienced a similar situation and reached a solution they can pass along, I would really appreciate it. Obviously, given the nature of my brother-in-law's company, there are MS specialists on staff but one of the reasons this project has been back-burnered for so long is that it's low priority compared to the other, far more important projects on everyone's plates. And since this is supposed to be a learning experience for me, I need to come up with a solution without involving them. So if any of you have anything you'd care to share that you think might be of help, that would be great. Thanks!
