Salesforce.com For Dummies

Chapter 22

Managing Data

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding your migration options

Executing your migration plan

Organizing your data

Using the right tools to migrate data

Getting help

If you’re a system administrator, often your greatest headache isn’t configuring or customizing the system but getting your data in and maintaining it so that it’s useful. Nothing hurts a rollout more than complaints from users that their data isn’t in Salesforce, that information is duplicated in several records, or even worse, that the information is wrong. Your end-user adoption suffers if you don’t maintain your records after the rollout. End-users love to complain about poor data quality, but they’re often not initially motivated to be diligent about putting clean data in there, or they’re in too much of a rush to determine sources of truth with other business groups, forgetting that garbage in equals garbage out. If you’re not diligent, you can find yourself in the same mess that drove you to Salesforce in the first place.

If data maintenance is giving you nightmares, use the data management tools in Salesforce to easily import leads, accounts, and contacts. If you have in-house expertise or engage a Salesforce partner, you can migrate other critical data (such as opportunities, cases, and activities) by using proven third-party tools. When your data is stored in Salesforce, you can rely on a variety of tools to help you manage and maintain your database.

In this chapter, we first discuss basic ...