We live in a world of a giant construction zone.

Take a look outside, and you’ll see new house being built, as well as older homes being renovated.

It’s the same for the CRM industry.

You have new companies diving head first into a new CRM package, whether the entire staff likes it or not.

Then you have larger companies unhappy with one vendor and switching to another. 

Ah, yes, good ol’ migration projects.  The word “migration” means dollar signs to consultants around the world.

But you never hear about the horror stories.  I wish more companies could blog about the possible headaches in a migration, and the lessons learned.

At Shopzilla Tech Blog, they wrote a nice piece on their migration from an Oracle database into Salesforce.com.

It wasn’t perfect, and no migration ever is, but it’s a good read.

In this example, Informatica Cloud Services was migrating from Dev to QA to Production.  You start the migration by logging into the target organization, then from there log into the source organization and pull the desired tasks and connections into the target organization.  You will need accounts for both organizations.

They listed 4 errors during the migration:

• Rounding Errors in Large Numbers

• Trailing Zeros in Smaller Numbers

• Oracle Views vs. Informatica Transformations

• Informatica Log Files Rollover

Read their full report here. A good lesson.

The 3 golden rules for a real estate agent is “location, location, location” but in the world of migrations, it’s “test, test, test”.

And documentation, which is always sorely lacking in IT shops.