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DOS based business software with customer info that needs to be transferred to a new business software.

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  • DOS
  • Business Computing
  • Software
Last response: in Business Computing
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November 6, 2013 8:20:00 AM

I have an old DOS based business software, with extensive customer information, that is no longer in use. Most of the new software firms I have been researching don't think it will be easy to get the DOS based info to their software. What is going to be the easiest way to transfer the data?

More about : dos based business software customer info transferred business software

November 6, 2013 8:39:25 AM

hire a data entry person to enter it to the new system.
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November 6, 2013 8:41:42 AM

That is an option I thought of but was hoping to avoid due to the tedious nature of the job and the amount of time it will consume to do so. Thank you though.
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November 6, 2013 8:47:12 AM

There was no standard way to keep data in the DOS days. There is no standard even now (one program can use external database, another one can use own data files).

So, hire someone to have a look at your old data files, it might be possible to extract the information from there. Be prepared to get (and pay for) the answer "It is not practical / not possible / I cannot do it".

It is completely different question how to import this info in your new system.
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November 6, 2013 9:39:30 AM

Alabalcho,

Can you elaborate a bit more what you mean by, "it is completely different question how to import this info in your new system"? We had one IT professional look at our old DOS program and the myriad of customer history information that was on there. It was his recommendation that it might be cheaper to have someone manually re-enter the info into excel and then we can import the excel files into whichever business software we decide to go with.
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November 7, 2013 9:08:20 AM

You IT person got it right - and this is what I was saying: exporting data from your old package is one thing, importing it into new package is another. One or both of these steps can fail or succeed.

It looks like you haven't yet decided on your new business package, so the question of importing old data (whether from Excel, text file etc) should be high on your agenda.
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November 9, 2013 8:52:20 PM

If it is a custom software, or if the supporting firm has closed, then your only option is to show the format of the data, so that it can be extracted and converted to the other program's readable format.
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November 10, 2013 3:39:00 PM

Which DOS-based program?
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November 15, 2013 4:47:05 PM

If your new software is SQL-based, then you might be able to use the data migration tools within SQL Server to create a custom routine that will extract the data from your old software data files and import them into the SQL database. I did this years ago to import the data from an old DOS-based POS program into Microsoft Dynamics RMS. I will tell you, however, that it is time-consuming and not perfect, and it was not very much fun. But it got our two most important items - our customer data and our inventory.
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