Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Exporting from ACT! into SQL Server

My company just purchased another company and I was tasked with extracting the data from the ACT! database that the purchased company was using for it's Contact Management to import into our CRM. The problem is that all of the contact data is in FoxPro .dbf files that I can extract from, but all of the sales and history data appears to be in unfamiliar file formats that I can not get to from the SQL QA, EM or Access. When I open them up in notepad, the data is a mess. The ACT export feature only appears to export this same Contact data which is pretty useless without everything else. There are third party plug ins that claim to be able to export all of the data, but I have only seen one that I really like and I do not really want to throw down $250 for something we are going to use once for 15 minutes. The trial version only lets you dump about 100 records. I googled the heck out of this and I could'nt find a solution.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.I finally got around to cracking this one. If anyone is ever tasked with migrating all of the data from ACT! to SQL Server only to discover you can not export everything from the ACT! front end (only contacts and groups) and you can not connect to the proprietary database file formats in the backend and you do not want to buy a 3rd party tools, there is a software development kit available. Here is the one for ACT!2005. I lost the link for the ACT! 6 SDK I used but I have it if anyone ever needs it.

ACT!2005 SDK

http://itdomino.act.com/act.nsf/docid/2004922131458

BEWARE: You have to relate the tables using their API. IF you just export the keys hoping to relate the tables later the keys come down encrypted and useless..

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