Switching to a new meeting and event scheduling system always takes some time and effort—even with a highly intuitive, web-based system like Mazévo. But it shouldn’t take many months of time and a huge effort, as it can with certain older systems. And that includes the process of migrating your data.
What is data migration (sometimes called data conversion)? Essentially, it’s the copying and pasting of data from your current system into the right data tables and fields in the new one. When it can be performed, it’s a serious time-saver as compared to manually recreating your buildings, rooms, reservations, etc.
Get Answers to These Questions Before Moving Forward With a Data Migration
Before migrating your data to Mazévo (or telling people at your organization that it can be done!), you need to answer the following six questions:
- What is your “old” system? Every event scheduling system stores data in a different way—in different data tables with different names for the data elements, etc. At Mazévo, we have extensive experience in converting EMS data into our format. If you’re using EMS and your data is in good shape, we highly recommend doing a data migration. We can perform that work for you in less than a day. (And we’re happy to do a free, no-obligation trial conversion. Contact us for details.) Given the time and effort it takes for our team to create a process for converting data from systems other than EMS, a data migration is generally not recommended with those systems.
- How clean is your EMS data? Migrating data that’s incorrect, outdated, improperly formatted, duplicated, or incomplete from EMS to Mazévo simply creates the same problems in your new database. If you’re concerned about your data quality, you may want to take some time to clean it up before the migration process. If your data is in particularly poor shape, it may be best to recreate it manually in Mazévo, making any needed modifications during that process.
- How often will you need access to historical data? It may sound like a good idea to bring over reservations that go back many years if not decades. But the reality is that the more data you migrate, the more challenges you’re likely to face down the road. For example, it can be hard to update your system and take advantage of new Mazévo features if you bring over an excessive amount of information. We recommend migrating 1-2 years of data from EMS. That way, you’ve got plenty of past reservations for reference, and they’re reservations that are recent enough to still be relevant.
- How long will you be able to access data and/or reports in the old system? Another reason that only a year or two of data is important to migrate is that many organizations who switch to Mazévo can still log into their old, on-premises scheduling system to view data or run reports if necessary. And that brings up an important point: Generating reports on the data in your old system just before switching to Mazévo and keeping the PDFs around indefinitely can be very helpful.
- What’s your “go live” target date with Mazévo? If you’ve got a short ramp-up period, a data migration may be the way to go. Of course, the previously mentioned cautions about the cleanliness of your data still apply and can still affect timing and feasibility.
- How many of your reservations are repeat events? If a significant percentage of them are, you may want to consider entering them manually, as Mazévo makes it simple to create recurring events. If you choose to go that route, we recommend starting with the events that are the furthest out in the future and working backward from there.
Your Manual Migration Methodology
If migrating your data programmatically isn’t feasible—or you simply choose not to migrate it—you can still streamline and simplify the switch to the new solution by thinking through your manual data migration methodology. In other words, you’ll greatly increase your efficiency and effectiveness if you go into recreating your old data in Mazévo with a plan.
With data migrations in general and Mazévo data conversions in particular, it rarely goes well when people are tasked more or less at random with rekeying a certain type of data “when they have time.” It’s much better and easier to get your data into Mazévo if you first consider the very logical and intuitive data relationships in the system and do your work in an organized way.
See Your EMS Data in Mazévo!
If you’re currently using EMS and wonder what it would be like to migrate data to Mazévo, we’re happy to convert a sample of your data. Contact us online or call 800-254-7615 for more information.
