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While planning data migration, there could arise a lot many technical challenges which you should overcome and ensure the accuracy of data migration. One of the best data migration tools widely discussed in the market is Scribe, which is a cloud-based data migration platform.  

Be it an On-premise environment or Cloud environment, Scribe platform will reduce the time taken and risk of the data migration projects. Scribe is an easy to use platform that provides data manipulation capabilities that you expect from an Extract, Transform and Load tool. Users can migrate data easily and efficiently without spending much time in writing a custom software to fulfill this requirement.

Scribe has two separate integration offerings namely,

  1. Scribe Insight (On-premise version)
  2. Scribe Online

Scribe Insight

Scribe Insight offers a streamlined approach to data integration for IT professionals, business analysts, and systems integrators who prefer an on-premises solution.

Scribe Online

A True Cloud Integration Platform Scribe Online is a multi-tenant, SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) data integration platform. It has two main components — the cloud environment and the agents.

Advantages of Using Scribe Tool for Data Migration:

  1. Easy-to-use
  2. Nightly jobs can be run through a built in scheduler.
  3. Scribe comes with a user interface and mapping tools, reducing the time to build the integrations.
  4. Rejected rows are outputted to a new table. This allows the job to be run against that table.
  5. Updating a mapping requires the user to look into the existing mapping and update the mapping. Once the file is saved, the mapping is updated no need to check other things.
  6. Scribe will update fields in the source and target if a field is added or removed.

Scribe is useful and productive in many ways as compared to other data migration tools available in the market.

For instance, here is how we implemented Scribe for Data Migration at MTC. Generally, data migration between Dynamics CRM environments with Account and Contact entities by other tools is a 3 step time-consuming process as listed below:

  1.  Account Migration
  2. Contact Migration
  3. Establish correlation between the entities (regarding primary contact id from account and parent customer in contact)

However, using Scribe data migration can be accomplished in a 2 step simple process as explained below.

Step1: Update/Insert Account

Step2: Update/Insert Contact.

Now that we have source and destination defined, and the data mapped, let us first define a variable that we will use to store the accountid guid from step1. We will need the accountid to assign to the Parent Customer Field when we update/create a contact record.

Here is how you do it:  From the top menu, click on View User Variables.  You will get following dialog:

Click on Add Target which will give you this dialog:

Name the variable as AccountGUID FromStep1 and select Step as type and pick Step1 as Data Object/Step. In this case Step 1 is Adapter for Dynamics CRM 2011. Account Update/Insert and select the field accountid. Now for each account record updated/created, the accountid guid will be assigned to this variable so that we can use it to assign it to the contact record next.

Now let us go to Step 2 and assign this variable value to the contacts parentcustomerid field.

As shown in the screen shot above, select step2 (in this case Adapter for Dynamics CRM 2011.contact Update/Insert) and then highlight parentcustomerid field and click on Formula button. Once the Edit Formula dialog comes up, click on Show User Variables. This will open a Variables dialog. Pick the variable that we created earlier i.e. AccountGUIDGromStep1 and click Insert in Formula.

You have finally assigned the accountid to the parentcustomerid field of the contact record. Now, that you have assigned the parentcustomerid field for contact record, we also have to set the parentcustomeridtype field to “1” indicating that the parentcustomerid field we just assigned is of type account. Now,let’s see how to update the Primary contact field of the account record updated/created in step1. Scribe has made it so easy to do it.

Go to step2, scroll down until you see a field named vfPrimary. This field, when set to true, would go back to the step1 and update the primarycontactid field of the account record with recently updated/created contact record GUID. To set this flag to true, select vfPrimary and then click Formula button and then type “Y” in the Edit Formula box and click OK and save the package.

Now, we are done configuring the steps. Run the package. Accounts will be assigned the primary contact and contacts are assigned the parent customer.