One particularly nasty “feature” of the Data Migration Wizard (DMM) is that if you leave the box labeled  “to accommodate the source data, automatically customize Microsoft Dynamics CRM list values and length of attributes” in its default checked position, it will create new picklist entries EVEN IF they already exist.

so e.g. if you have a name/value pair in the picklist of “Hawaii/50″ and you upload a customer record with a State value of 50, DMM will create a new picklist with a name value pair of “50/50″ which really sucks.

 Unfortunately, the only way I know of to fix this is that you have to go to the customization of that entity containing the picklists and delete the extra incorrect picklist entries.

Unfortunately, your entity records will still display the wrong values.  So you have to delete and re-migrate.

Of course if you have lots of really long picklists, it’s going to suck.

Moral of the story: continue testing your imports using very small data sets until everything is 100% right. I’ve been doing countless migrations so far in what I thought was a trivial data structure.

I tried a bunch of ways, including to attempt to import the precise fields that were exported without any changes, and I get nothing but errors.  More research and/or tech support.

tried to import same file via DMM.  Got 100% failures. This was repeated for each line.

“1″,”updateEmailtoCRM.csv”,”2″,”An error has occurred. Please see the log file for more information.”,”",”",”Generic SQL error.”

I’ve only got a few fields to import for the Member (contact) attribute:

GUID

Last Name

Email1

Email 2

and going through the import wizard fails.

I will try on Data Migration Manager (DMM)

I’ve got to be able to do mass updates of various data and see this feature is available via the web import tool, (“Enrich data by updating…”) which is weird b/c the MS folks told me updates are essentially impossible, yet a blog post from way before my tech support call says otherwise.

My process will be:

1. Export Member entity using MSCRM Data Export tool.
2. Import Member to MSaccess
3. Manipulate as needed.
4. Export only changed fields and CRM key fields to CSV
5. Import the updates.

Whew.  Lessons learned:

• Leave that friggin’ first checkbox UNCHECKED. damn.
• Do things in the smallest possible increments so that you don’t invest a lot of time only to find out it’s not working.
• If possible, do all the manipulation on your end before you import. e.g.: I had “M/F” for gender in my db but MS wants 1/2.  Instead of having to hand-code an import map, I just changed the data on my to make M=1 & F=2.  Much easier.
• Test with very small batches of data.
• Remember to delete the records before attempting to re-import them.

I never deleted my member (contact) records before the import so that’s probably why: the “dups” never went in. 

Now I deleted the members AND republished the attribute containing picklists. Lets see.

damn. I deleted the extra picklist entries. then imported from the data migration manager with the box checked OFF and got the same problem.

wtf.

Perhaps I need to publish the member table to get the picklists to take effect. crap.

If the migration creates new picklist entries, running through the “delete migrated data” process is microsoft CRM does NOT delete the newly created picklist entries.

better watch out for that checkbox!  IMO they should leave it UNCHECKED by default because the worst that will happen is you’ll get error messages if you mistakenly leave it unchecked.

but the results could be seriously messed up if, like me, you mistakenly left it checked and then imported huge picklists which now have to be manually deleted via a painful process in the customization section.

Ouch.

Good news and bad news:

Good: I confirmed that you get picklist imports to work right be leaving that checkbox (check my prev post) UNCHECKED.

Bad: I accidently left it checked and now I have a bunch doo-doo in my picklists. 

Now I get to test the “undo the import” feature.  Lets see if that works.