Hi Mike
Fair question. I was not familiar with itImport, so I downloaded and had a look. Obviously this does not make me an expert on it, so I am reluctant to make too many comments. It looks like a good application for its intended purpose, but based on what I can see the answer to your question is "yes". A brief summary of
Inaport for ACT capabilities:
1. Inaport can pull data from any ODBC compliant data source, or text files. You can use SQL SELECT to join tables, use WHERE clauses, and the SQL can be parameterized. For example, pull sales orders from the accounting system with a create date greater than the date of the last import.
2. Data Transformation. Inaport has an extensive range of specialized functions for transforming and reshaping data: splitting and combining fields, extracting data from badly formatted fields, changing data types (e.g. convert string to date or vice versa). It also has full support for regular expressions which let you do anything imaginable to text.
3. Mapping - Inaport lets you match and update mutliple table in a single operation e.g. update Company, Contact and History in a single import
4. Matching - Inaport lets you match on any field or combination of fields, and you can use expressions to extract portions of fields e.g. company name plus phone area code. It also supports normalisation of company names (lower case, strip white space, strip noise words such as pty ltd, inc, incorporated, gmbh,...). Finally it has Fuzzy Matching - a scoring based system that lets you match mis-spelt terms (e.g. InaPlex and Innerplex)
5. Manageability - Inaport allows job to be scheduled (it is an external app, not part of the ACT UI) provides detailed log files of the run
So in summary, the following scenario would be straightforward in Inaport:
Pull account and sales order data from an accounting system running on SQL server, and transform the numeric fiedls into currency format strings, modify the date fields to a useful format, match on a user field in Company, update company with a running YTD total, update history with the sales order, and update a custom entity with the sales details. Set this up to run unattended at 2am every night, with a full log fle to be viewed in the morning, detailing how many records processed, tables updated, and details of each record excluded with the reason why.
Of course, it could alos be used to import an Excel list of leads into Company and Contact, with fuzzy match on the company name and a secondary match on the person last name and phone number.
As a bit of background - Inaport has been used in the SalesLogix and SageCRM world for years, both for initial data load of the new systems with disparate enterprise data, and ongoing integration between front office and back office.
HTH. Happy to answer any questions, or provide a demo if you are interested.
Reagrds
David Evans
