Hey All!
Our organization recently had a meeting in which we determined that half of us are entering and tracking individuals in MS Access (Artistic, Education, and Production), while the other half is working in Tessitura (Marketing, Development, and Box Office). As you all know, we're more often than not trying to enter and track the same individuals, and the two halves of the organization often have a heckuva time keeping one another posted across the separate tracking systems (Stop me if you've heard this one before!) ... and of course, each has been building their own database that sometimes agrees with the other, sometimes not ...
So for the moment, the nature of the processes in place and some of the data entered dictates that we're going to live in this sort of yin and yang world. As such, I'm wondering if anyone has found a successful way to import data from Access into Tessitura (forgive me if this feature is built-in ... I'm kind of a noob)? Can such an import be used to create new constituent records or modify existing records? I presume if it's possible that there will be certain pitfalls or caveats to watch out for ... ?
Any guidance that anyone has to offer in this regard is much appreciated! Forgive me if this is already posted somewhere, I attempted to ferret it out but came up dry ...
Thank you!
Brian Jones
The v10 version of the Constituent Import Utility does not allow the import of an attribute, but you can bring in a pre-determined constituent id (customer_no), which would allow you to link them prior to import.
In v11, the Constituent Import Utility can optionally import a selected attribute, which would allow more of a surrogate key relationship.
You can also bypass the Bulk Copy Process (BCP) directly and insert data directly into TW_CONSTITUENT_IMPORT before running the Import Utility process. Just grab a session id to include in the insert. There’s more information about this in the Constituent Import documentation. Also, all three import routines (Contribution, Order, Constituent) support this bypass method.
+Ryan Creps
+Tessitura Network
From: Tessitura Technical Forum [mailto:forums-technical@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Levi SauerbreiSent: Monday, November 28, 2011 3:31 PMTo: Ryan CrepsSubject: Re: [Tessitura Technical Forum] MS Access Importability?
You should check out the Constituent Import Utility. It is a standard report/utility. In short, you create a tab delimited file with the correct layout and Tessitura will check to see if a patron already exists and create a new record if it does not.
Read the documentation for a more complete description.
I think there is also an option to have it create an attribute to serve as an alternate ID which would give you a way to relate the two systems to each other loosely (knowing the Access ID of the patron record in Tessitura for instance).
From: Brian Jones <bounce-brianjones7980@tessituranetwork.com>Sent: 11/28/2011 1:40:28 PM
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Thank you all for your insights! I'm going to play around with this over the coming weeks and see what I can come out with.