General Consultant Discussion

Got a call from a customer who just bought another company. The acquired company uses an accounting product called Certiflex Dimensions. They are requesting help extracting data from Certiflex for conversion into their Infor system. Does anyone in the group have any past experience with Certiflex? I understand it uses Pervasive as a database engine. Luckily we have a lot of experience with Pervasive but that doesn't mean I can navigate the application data. That would be like saying I can find my way around London because I can speak English (sort of. I AM from Oklahoma!) Thanks for any insight the group can share.

You probably do this but ... We have focused on verifying if the package has ODBC connection, and then finding how many of their standard reports can be dumped to Excel. We have called the package's tech support for guidance too, with the customer paying for it.

I have always used Monarch for this - get the reports to text then strip out the relevant info. http://www.datawatch.com/products/monarch/ It's been a while since I've used Monarch and doing a quick Google search there are a few ""Monarch Alternative"" paid ads which I think are there because Monarch got very expensive and they seem to have embraced much larger companies. Monarch (or equivalent) used to let you open a text file, define the fields, then export out that info to a CSV, Excel. It is very powerful and a great tool when you are in a pinch with a system that you don't have a dictionary for -- or the dictionary is very complex. Starting with a report as the export base is a great way to completely bypass some of the bizarre dictionaries these legacy/older systems have.

I wonder if you can access the data tables using the ODBC in Excel like you can for Sage. If you have to use the report route, IDEA is another program like Monarch, however, I'm not sure how it compares in cost.

IDEA and Monarch are priced similarly. Monarch is now bundled in a package called Datawatch. It's about $2000.