You probably have several years of accumulated information about your Customers in at least two or more sources. Some or all of this information you may wish to convert to the MX-Contact system.

We generally recommend that you consider converting the essential information about all of your Customers and prospective Customers if it is available in an electronic form.

The essential information usually includes the Customers' names, addresses, types, telephone and fax numbers, and key contacts. If the information is not available in an electronic format, we suggest that you key enter this information about your top 20% of Customers that generate the most business for you. A temporary data entry clerk might be used for this purpose. Other Customers then are added later as needed.

In the process of conversion, you may wish to "clean up" your database. For example, you may have several old Customer records for customers that you do not do business with anymore. You also may have duplicate Customer records. For this reason, we often encourage clients to have someone review the data before importing.

Since your customer database may be quite different than any other, you may choose for MX-Contact to run filters that change the values in certain fields to MX-Contact values, to consolidate some data, or to plug in automatically certain missing fields.

The data conversion process would have been specified in the Business Analysis phase and included in the project plan. In the data mapping document, the structure of the data would have been specified i.e. the proposed data source that the data must be converted to prior to import. This may be a Microsoft Access or SQL database, or a Microsoft Exchange Public folder.

If the data conversion is to be done automatically, then the import procedures will be developed to convert the data from this data source into MX-Contact. This process will also be thoroughly tested on a copy of your actual database, and once the process has been approved by the Client, the conversion will be executed on the production environment.

In the case of a remote implementation, any data conversion will be done by ExchangeWise prior to installation of the system. The data will then have to be provided by the Client to ExchangeWise in the required format and will be converted into the Personal Folders Store (.pst) file that will be used for the installation.