Contact Migration Strategies
From Provider Notes
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Contents |
Introduction
In general, contacts allow more flexibility in the migration process than either calendar migration or (especially) email migration. In many cases contacts will be migrated in conjunction with other migration processes, such as calendar and email. However, a little planning around the contacts migration can go a long way.
Contact data almost always can be exported in common, easily edited formats. For example, Thunderbird can export its Address Book data as LDIF, Comma Separated Value, or Tab Delimited while Meeting Maker exports its Address Book as Tab Delimited. Outlook has the option to look at the data as it is being imported and see whether or not there are duplicate records already in existence.
The information below is a general discussion about things providers should consider when thinking about contact migration. Specific migration steps are outlined in separate documents about each supported product containing contacts.
Before the migration
Clean out the utterly useless
Over time, the ease in creating contacts can result in many obsolete contacts that have no need for migration. Time spent removing unnecessary contacts on the "front end" will usually be repaid two to three-fold later.
Multiple contact files
If you are migrating multiple contact files for the client (for instance, from Meeting Maker and from Thunderbird) it is important to ascertain before the migration which files contain the "better" data (contacts which are either more current or more complete).
During the migration
Better goes first
Migrate the "better" contacts first, using either a PDA or local desktop export/import. Once the data is successfully migrated, you may wish to use Outlook's or Entourage's Categories capability to color code your "better" contact data for ease of comparison with the rest of the contact data.
Bring over the rest
Migrate the remaining contacts. Some data will probably concatenate with already migrated contacts (usually with warning dialogs but sometimes without) and some will appear (correctly or incorrectly) as new contacts. If there are more than two sources of contact data, you may wish to use more Categories color codes.
After the migration
After the migration process(es) are complete, it is worth setting aside some time as soon as possible to review and organize the imported contacts. If there were multiple sources of contact data, it is likely that there will have been some duplication of data. There is no automatic way to search for and eliminate contacts, as there may be variations in the individual entries. A manual sweep of the data is the surest way that unique records are not being destroyed.
Removing Duplicates
In the Outlook 2007 help file, they recommend the following method of searching for duplications:
- In Contacts, select the contacts folder that has duplicate records
- In the Navigation Pane, under Current View, click Phone List.
- On the View menu, point to Current View, and click Customize Current View
- Click Fields, select Modified in the Available fields list, and then click Add.
- Click Move Up until Modified is at the top fo the Show these fields in this order list.
- Click OK twice
- In the list of contacts, hold down CTRL while you select each duplicate contact.
- When you have selected all the duplicate contacts, press DELETE.
