Migrate WCBS PASS to iSAM (Not the finance bit)

[bodminman]

Hi there,

 

I have been tasked with leading the migration of our PASS MIS over to iSAMs and only having very little knowledge of PASS and no knowledge of iSAMs, this is starting to stress me out a little.

 

Has anyone elso do this move and if so can you please share how you managed to export 'all' your data from PASS etc etc.

 

Thanks

[AngryTechnician]

PASS is fairly easy to get data out of as the database structure isn't terribly complicated (though a bit messy), but I suspect there will be a lot of schema differences between the two. I would have thought you would need to liaise with someone at iSAMs, is there a reason they are not handling the migration for you?

[Netman]

Did this very job back in 2009 - it wasn't too painful so don't worry too much! iSAMS are very helpful during the process. I might be able to remember what I did if you want to PM me!!

In short, it was connect excel to PASS via ODBC and pull the relevant data out (finding the right tables was a pain IIRC), then clean up the data a bit and then submit it all to iSAMS, who did the import.

[bodminman]

PASS is fairly easy to get data out of as the database structure isn't terribly complicated (though a bit messy), but I suspect there will be a lot of schema differences between the two. I would have thought you would need to liaise with someone at iSAMs, is there a reason they are not handling the migration for you?

 

They have just sent me a load of xls docs that contain the iSAMs field headings and they have asked me to look at the docs, complete various bits of info and then match there field names against those in use in PASS.

[GNewnham]

Hi

 

I did this exercise 2 years ago - mostly used the export to excel function in Pass to get all the names, addresses etc. The biggest problem is the quality of your data in Pass and whether it is set up with joint parent records or single ones. Ours was single and I had to separate parents into 2 records for the iSAMS import ie Mum and Dad with the correct phone nos etc - this was a bit tricky. Our data was not great as we had mums phone numbers in the fax no field etc. Also the file for depicting the siblings was hard to create from Pass and required quite a lot of manual manipulation.

 

Also, you need to decide how much info you are going to bring over iro past pupils - ie all, only last year's leavers, last 5 year's leavers etc

 

Am happy to chat on the phone or communicate by email if I can help.

 

PM me and I will give you my details.