Facil to CiviCRM Conversion

Last week, channelAustin participated in Denver Open Media's demo of how they use CiviCRM with the Open Media Project (http://groups.drupal.org/node/18772)

In the past two days, 4 channelAustin staff (Communications Director & Webmaster, IT Director, Training Director, and Equipment staff) worked with David Strauss from Four Kitchens (http://fourkitchens.com/) to set up CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org/), analyze table schemas in our existing Facil database (MS Access 97), determine which Facil tables and fields we want to import into CiviCRM.

Day one was spent on an overview and in-depth tour and explanation of CiviCRM's functionality as well as a discussion on how want to utilize it. Day two was spent on us staff actually doing the work of creating custom data fields and setting various parameters and options. We worked in teams of two. And we through a task list developed by David. It was a hands-on training and work session.

We decided to work specifically with the Facil tables that does not involve direct integration with the Open Media Project.

These include:tblClass, tblClassRegistration, tblOrganization, tblPayment, tblPerson, tblPersonOrg, tblTransaction, tblVendor

Other tables that we thought functionality of the OM Project and MERCI will handle were left alone: tbleEquipMaint, tblEquipType, tblEquipUnit, tblProgram, tblProgramSchedule, tbl

Some tables we chose not to bother with because we don't use them: i.e. Tapes and Clips

Attached is an Excel spreadsheet that shows that shows the tables and rows I'm talking about along with the corresponding CiviCRM equivalent in the first column.

There were only a few table fields for which there was not an equivalent in CiviCRM. For most of these we were able to use the Custom Data option in CiviCRM to create those fields.

There are some features of Facil that we will not be able to replicate easy with CiviCRM. For example, Facil enables fairly easy production of Producer ID cards. There will need to be a work-around for this.

Our next step is to prepare to import the data. There are several steps involved with this that I'll outline and explain a bit after the successful completion. CiviCRM has an automatic import feature that works well with clean data.

Overall, CiviCRM appears to offer a lot of flexibility for customization. There is a learning curve. And it will require effort on our part to begin using it. In the long run it will pay off.