Data Migration Pitfalls to Know before Attempt

Salesforce technology is ever evolving, so do business needs – and often they make an incentive for migration. The projects involving Salesforce data migration are not only costly and time-consuming, but also require meticulous preparation, certified Salesforce.com developers and admins and thorough Salesforce quality assurance to be a success. Sometimes it takes up to 60% of deployment time to migrate it all and what is more, almost half of the projects got stuck into the complex net of users, accounts, records…

To avoid such a collapse, let’s take a step-by-step look at the whole process and figure out what hidden complexity can hit you.

Setting the right objectives

When your company plan Salesforce integration with 3rd parties and it requires data migration the first thing you have to do is to identify the right business needs. When you ask yourself “Who’s the subject matter expert in your business?” you start thinking of Salesforce development team but they won’t be using the data after system deployment. In other words, survey the end-users who’ll be operating Salesforce org once it is ready, learn their workflow and decide on what data really matters.

Preparation stage

None of data migrations in Salesforce can do without thorough planning.It is like moving to another flat: you choose the district, the apartment, the facilities but your old furniture doesn’t fit. The goal of the preparation phase is to break down the data, map it across the new ecosystem and identify whether the data is able to coexist in the new environment, which users have what kind of licences etc.  

When quality leaves much to be desired

When migrating to a new system, we always emphasize that we’re not looking to preserve the existing the way it is: so check whether it is of acceptable quality. If you notice that your company has different email records while having the same email address it is definitely a wake-up call for you to consider what it will take to extract and upload it into the new Salesforce organization.

Moving to Salesforce: how to load

After everything is planned, here comes the crucial step: data loading. There are a lot of migration solutions for Salesforce in the market and it’s for you to decide which suits better for you but we suggest starting with Apex data loader: no Salesforce applications or licenses required. Check out Salesforce AppExchange to find solution of your choice.

Quality Assurance

Don’t stop with the loading step. Salesforce QA process takes more than migrating data itself. And earlier it begins, easier to reduce all the risks of failure. You really need to make sure that you’re testing the data, evaluating it, and providing user acceptance procedures, otherwise, your efforts will come to nothing.

Overall, data migration doesn’t seem to be the easiest part of your Salesforce integration, however, without this you will not have your “Earth” revolving. Contact us and make your migration experience fast and smooth.