Project contact list migration part 1

My old Nokia phone reached this year the school-age (became 6 years old), and I was satisfied with him in the past. Unfortunately it became deaf and mute recently, so I was forced to purchase a new phone (iPhone).

I possess a mobile phone since 1997 and I carried the contacts from phone to phone. Beside this I have an Address Book of the E-Mail software (Thunderbird) with contacts, an address book of Outlook Express from an old PC, and an Excel table which is a copy of my former business phone.

So I have 4 sources with various contacts (redundancy is there), and a question: How to merge and migrate all contacts within the shortest time and maximum quality? (in this question I have to be maximalist: I do not accept 95% data quality, because what should I do with 20-50 garbage contact in my new phone?)

Migration Planning and Project Initiation

After the scope is defined very clearly, I form the topic of effort estimation generously this time: max. 2 days.

Configuration Management and software tools:

Because typing on the PC is 10 times faster than with the tiny buttons of iPhone, I have to find 1 or 2 transient data store, where the synchronization can happen very fast. For the last step iTunes synchronisation tool is the only appropriate way and it works properly.

Plan of workflow

The key element of the workflow is the right choice of the transient data store. Because the export-import possibilities of the different data sources are unknown at the moment, this key momentum will be clarified during the project.

Because of this we found in this tiny project a risk which can affect the delivery time (in this case the time of full contact list on the iPhone) – and as we know the most of the data migration projects (84%) fail because of delayed delivery time.

Transient data store for migration Nr.1

The extraction of the contacts from the Nokia is theoretically very simple: I have no tool, no data cable to download the contact list – so the manual job remains whatever it hurts. The destination: plain paper or an address book directly. I have chosen the direct entry into the Thunderbird Address Book, because nowadays I type faster than write. And with this move the number of data sources will decrease with one.

Surprise Nr 1: There is no direct connection between iTunes and Thunderbird. The possible contact sources of iTunes are Windows Address Book, Google Contacts and Outlook Express Contacts.

So lets export the data from Thunderbird to Windows Address Book. Of course there is no direct connection in this direction, so I have 2 possibilities: CSV export and LDIF (LDAP server).Note that at this time we have 3 transient data sources: Thunderbird Adress Book, CSV (or LDIF) and WAB.

Short summarized: about 30% of the contacts were simply not migrated, I don’t know the reason. After one or two attempts I dropped this possibility and have chosen the remaining option: Google Contacts

Transient data store for migration Nr 2.

The life is not easy, there is no direct connection between Thunderbird and Google Contacts. After a short research I found  the Zindus add-on for Thunderbird, where the synchronisation between Thunderbird and Google Contacts supposed to be solved.

And it worked: the data synchronisation between Thunderbird and Google and also between Google Contacts and iPhone through iTunes.

Surprise Nr 2: However as I checked the application contacts in iPhone, I faced a new problem: the sequence of last name and first name.

For explanation: Hungary is one of the rare places of the world (beside Japan I think), where the official sequence of the name is “Last name” “first name“. So I want to see my contacts in the phone that way, however Google Contacts messed this sequence up.

Of course the Google application does not recognise (even if the settings are for Hungary), what is the right sequence. The fast solution is put a comma between “Last name” and “first name“, like Bossányi Tibor. And this is again manual work for many hundred contacts. (I don’t want to tell long stories about the attempts to set the settings to English (UK),exporting the list in CSV to find the fastest solution to put this comma into the names. It does not work.)

Summary

To not to loose too much time with this simple operation (at the first look), I had to think in a project way: finding a clear scope, a simple effort estimation and a  measurable action plan to avoid shifting this activity. In this first part I found the most optimal way between the possibilities by attempting more different ways and measure which is the most effective in aspect of time and data quality.

The next (last) part I will write about the data quality rules which have been set up, and the migration from remaining legacy sources.

Sources

Data Migration Project Checklist from datamigrationpro.com

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