I have rather an awkward predicament when it comes to file importing, but it's not so rare that nobody else has experienced it (or so I hope!)
I've recently deployed a CRM (4.0) and imported many client records from various sources. Each client has a name and a unique ID (used for our internal processes). We also have many documents relating to each client, on a shared folder. They are in the following format:
\\Servername\Documents\Smith, John AB1234\
There are about 1,200 of these folders, for around 32,000 documents in total. Some documents are in subfolders (like 'Received Letters' or 'Contracts'), and it is likely that there will be document files with the same names (e.g. 'Contract.doc'). Files are mostly PDF, DOC and XLS. In theory it's easyish to uniquely identify each folder and match it to a CRM record (by the ID number, which should also be in CRM).
What we're looking to do is import the documents in each client's folder and attach them to the client's record in CRM. The CRM blog mentions one way to import files (http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/03/11/migrating-notes-and-attachments-using-data-migration-manager.aspx), but it's fairly picky in the way files are laid out (and would be hard to do for such a large number of documents). What's a sensible way to do this job? Is the method described in the blog post the best way, with a bit of cleverness to get all the documents into the right folders? Or is there a tool (Scribe?) that would help us automate it? We're a fairly small business without too much in the way of scripting/automation skills, so writing our own application is out of the question!
Hopefully someone with a similar problem can share their experiences. Thanks in advance!
