Hi,
Scribe is quite a powerful software not only for importing data, but also for keeping integration between two data sources.
For importing, what it can do is to queue the whole importing process to ensure that relationships are imported in a "streamlined" manner. So it makes sure for example, that when you're importing accounts, it will create all parent accounts and then add
the accounts that are "children" of those parent accounts. If you use another method of importing data, and you don't take parent account and child accounts into consideration, during the import, if a children account can't find its parent account in the system
(say, it haven't been created yet), the import would fail.
Also, if you want to use the import feature of Dynamics CRM 2011 (I assume you using Dynamics CRM 2011) you must import data from files. For example, Excel 2003 XML files, or comma separated value files (CSV). Scribe on the other hand allow you to use connectors
that can plug straight into the data source, be it a "generic" SQL database, or a Dynamics CRM 4 database, SAP, etc.
When importing data with the Dynamics CRM data import function, it allows you to set what fields would consider the records to be duplicate. For instance, when importing patients you might want to say that FULL NAME (a combination of Name and Last Name)
is what ensures that they're duplicate. However since it is often the case that people can bear the same name, you might want to look into another field like National ID number or Payroll number, or Patient Record Number. Finally, you can choose if you want
to allow duplicates to be imported based on the duplicate detection rule you set out.
Depending on the amount of data you have and how often you will have to import data into CRM, Scribe might be an overkill.
I am not an expert in Scribe but I worked with teams that used it before and if I had to integrate Dynamics with any other product or perform a complex and time-consuming import, Scribe would be the first solution I would look into.
