I am going to have to set up a project. which involves transfering data from an alms system onto our current raiser edge system. There will be approx 10,000 records which will need to be transfered. My concerns are: 1) its like that some of the constituents will already be on raisers edge, so how can i avoid duplication. Is the only way just to run the duplicate report once i have imported all the data! 2) how would i import data and make raisers edge create a constituent id for me whilst importing. As the Alms urn will be put in as an attribute so that the constituent id on raisers is consitent. Is this the best way to do it? How would i import this data without creating a constituent id first? other than that, any tips or ideas would be much appericated. Thank you for your time. Ayse. Contactable by email: [Email Removed] Please visit www.sja.org.uk for more information about St John Ambulance. Also if you have any spare time check out. www.officialfoundonvincentward.com

Hi Ayse, Hope you had a happy new year! I have a plug-in that looks up records in RE from a list in a file. This was primarily designed to be used for checking whether a cold list was in fact cold. It could easily be used here too. It matches on various criteria. Check out my posting on RE Users Forum - there is a screenshot too of the plugin. http://reusers.server-planet.com/admin-config-user-options/1085-duplicates-oh-world.html#post7250  You can search for dupes on surname, first name or initial, first line of address, postcode, email address as well as organisation names etc. It has proven to be very useful for this kind of work. The results give you the constituent and import ids of the matching records so that these can be separated from the records that do not exist in RE and updated accordingly. As for your other question about the Alms Id, I would put that id into an alias. That way you can look up the record using the alms id and not just the RE record. It is a very effective method. It is simple to include the Alms id in the import while still allowing RE to create constituent ids. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any more information about this. David Zeidman Development http://www.zeidman.info

David what is the cost of this plugin? [Email Removed] Chadwick School, California