Please help me get my data back!
October 16, 2012 3:54 PM   Subscribe

Have you successfully retrieved your contact data from an older CRM?

I have been using TeamscopeCRM to manage my contacts in Outlook. I have several custom fields. I would like to export the contacts to an excel or CSV file that includes the custom field data. So far I've only been able to export the standard outlook fields.

Please tell me, oh hivemind, how to export all of the information? I'm obviously exporting it because I want to move away from that CRM, AND the company itself is extremely hard to reach directly, so going back to Teamscope is an absolute last resort. "Export contacts from Teamscope CRM" google-fu has failed utterly.

Thanks!
posted by ichbinsocki to Technology (1 answer total)
 
Not familiar with this software and searching for a manual or docs only resulted in broken .chm files. Furthermore, TeamScope CRM claims (PDF) that it uses "Exchange public folders" to store its data, whatever that means.

If you could figure out the actual data store and location, you might be able to export the data by yourself. For example, if it turns out that Teamscope CRM stores data in a Microsoft SQL Server database, you can use SQL to export the data. I would start by looking at those exchange public folders, maybe there's a text file or database dump somewhere there.

Can you print your contacts, custom fields included? If so, you might be able to print them to a file, which means that you at least have the data stored in a text file.

Also, TeamScope sells software that might be used to export your contacts data; unfortunately both DataLink for Outlook and TeamScope CRM Power Pack cost several hundreds of dollars.

As a last resort, it might be possible to code a screen scraper that cycles through your contacts, extracts the data and saves it to a text file. But usually this is a pita and requires detailed knowledge of TeamScope CRM's inner workings and lots of trial and error.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:51 PM on October 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


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