I've got a case open with MS support on this issue. At first the MS tech said that Sage had a patch to resolve the issue. When the MS tech conferenced in Sage support the tech checked with senior support and development, twice, to confirm that no such patch existed. The Sage tech suggested trying to convert the ACT! demo DB which worked without issue. Sage tech also suggested running ACT! DB maintenance on the production DB which I had already done, but did again any way. The issue persists. ACT! 2007/9 is running the latest update/build. All MSUpdates have been installed for Office 2007 including the update for BCM that allows it to show ACT! 2007/9 as a choice during the import wizard. Prior to getting the latest MSUpdates I noticed that ACT! ver 2007/9 was not a choice. So I start the import to BCM wizard which in turn spawns the BCM conversion utility. We choose company and contact records to bring in and then select some specific fields for each including 10 user defined fields on the contact record. The conversion starts and one thing is noticeably different between the production DB and demo DB. When converting the production DB only 1 company record is processed before the conversion moves on to 3100+ contacts. When converting the demo DB all company records were converted before the process moved on to the contact records. The conversion of the production DB consistently gets to contact record 765 and then fails. Earlier last week the process went to contact record 763 before failing. At that time we opened the production ACT! DB and deleted contact 763 and 2 others from the same company. After the conversion utility fails the BCMImportUtility.log file reports "Error during conversion: Type,Message,RowKey Contact, System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown." I've monitored the available memory during the entire conversion process and memory is never an issue. The MS tech created a new Outlook profile with a new/empty .PST file and tried the BCM conversion from that profile, but the process still failed at contact record 765. Our production Outlook profile is connected to an Exchange 2003 account. That's the whole story. I'm waiting to hear back from the MS tech after he sent me the pinpointtools.com "Moving from ACT! 6.0 to BCM 2003" to review last Friday. While the document was very informative and well done, it of course assumed that all of the ACT! and BCM processes work without issue. After reviewing the document I emailed the MS tech to request that the case be escalated to a tier 2 BCM tech. I've also requested the newer "Moving from ACT! to BCM 2007" doc, but have yet to successfully receive it from pinpointtools.com via email. Oh, one last thing. I MUST have ACT! notes and history come over to BCM. So exporting from ACT! to a .csv file and then importing that into BCM is not an option as notes and history are lost using this method. Any help is greatly appreciated!

kgoodenberger:

Well, I feel your pain, if that helps...

The problem with deleting a record in ACT is that you really don't know which one it is. What you see on the screen is alphabetized.  Even if you could see how the records are stored in the ACT database, you don't really know which one BCM thinks is record 763.  And, it could be one of the history or activity records it's choking on, not the contact record. 

What we do know from a few years of experience with the BCM conversion is that it's very sensitive and when it encounters a corrupt ACT record (and there are many of those living quietly in databases all over the planet), it will throw an error.  The error may not refer to the actual problem, like the out of memory error you got. This is what's happening to you.

I would recommend a few things:
1.  Pay www.act-to-bcm.com to convert the database.  They're pricey but competent and are the only known method of getting old ACT data into BCM.  This will solve your conversion problem.

2.  Convert just the contacts by exporting in CSV.  Mentally decide that in the event you have to see history, go back to ACT and do a lookup there -- all new history is in BCM.  The real question here is "how many times do you have to go look at history"?

3.  Convert just the contacts by exporting in CSV.  Use a more manual way of getting notes/history out.  Run a Notes/History report, grouped by contact, and save it as a text file.  Now you have a document that could be searched whenever you need to find old data.  You could leave it as a shared document on a server so everyone could search it.  Or, you could copy the notes/history for one contact and paste it into the Comments field in BCM for that contact.  That would make it searchable in BCM.

4.  Change your thinking from "link to contact record" to "search something to find the data".  This is the future of data storage -- you can index thousands of documents and Outlook indexes email so you can find something almost instantly.  The days of drilling down to a contact's history record is so last century and much slower than search.

5.  Forget BCM and move to Microsoft CRM Online.  You could use our GetLoaded for MS CRM software that's about to be released and we'll convert your ACT database into CRM.

Hope that helps...

Lon

Thanks for the prompt and detailed reply Lon. I understand what you mean about not really knowing what ACT! "record" the BCM conversion process is choking on. We just took a stab at finding and deleting the correct record number 763.

Your first suggestion is painful to read considering hind sight. We came across act-to-bcm.com when researching the ability to import ACT! 2007/9 data into BCM 2003. At that time we passed on it due to the cost and figuring that BCM 20007 could convert and import everything. Now, many hours later, act-to-bcm.com seems like it would have been a no brainer had we known then what we know now.

We've only got a single user using ACT! so the questions of how important going back to ACT! notes and history data is will depend on that user's habits.

I totally agree with searching CRM data by way of indexes that are constantly being updated. It pains me to watch people sort their email by sender or subject and then start scrolling to find what they are looking for!

MS CRM online may be an option for us to look into.

Thanks again!