Business Problem: As part of a conversion from Windows-based PCs to Macintoshes, our client was moving from MS OutlookTM to Now ContactTM for contact management. Unfortunately, Now Contact could not import directly from Outlook and they did not share a common import/export format. They had 17,000 contact records spread across four different PCs. Paying someone to rekey the data would be enormously expensive. Consider that even if the data entry person could copy one contact per minute, it would still take them 283 hours to complete the task. Even assuming they could hire a temp at $15 per hour (a very low price for the client's geographic region), that's over $4,000 worth of labor.
To make things more complicated, the four sets of contacts overlapped. They had many of the same people, but not always with the same information for those people. In some cases, there were even duplicates within a single set of contacts. The client needed these duplicates eliminated and information about each unique person consolidated.
Solution: After working with the client to establish the criteria for identifying duplicate contacts and merging their information, we created a set of applications to extract the data from Outlook, merge the duplicates and convert it to a form that could be imported by Now Contact. The total time required was 12 hours and the cost was less than 15% of the optimistic scenario above.
Technical Details: MS Outlook can export data in a number of different formats, but Now Contact only supports importing its own tab-delimited format1. We manually exported the data from the four Outlook PST files, then created a set of programs to transform and merge the data in steps, resulting in a modular design that will allow for future reuse. The programs were created in C++ and GNU AWK, leveraging the respective strengths of the languages (C++ for raw data manipulation and AWK for text manipulation).
1. As of version 4.
