The business card scanning device produced by CardScan is very popular with users of CRM because of the amount of time it saves when entering data from business cards into the CRM system.

Unfortunately, every now and then, something strange happens and data entered into CRM by CardScan "destabilizes" the system.  This instability surfaces when you attempt to synchronize your contacts with Microsoft Outlook. For some reason, the synchronization process will fail, and really not give you a good reason as to why.

Root Cause

I was working with Stephen Noe, a Certified CRM  Consultant, Trainer and Project Manager of Business IT Professionals of Cary, NC. to help him identify the problem.

It turns out that the CardScan developers are really, really, sharp and they actually took into account the possibility that someone may have a two-line job title, as shown below:

They actually put both lines into the Contact's Job Title Attribute, which is where the problem occurs.

When CardScan adds the Job Title to CRM, it actually puts a linefeed character as a separator between the two lines of the business card.  If CRM were expecting this, it would not be a big deal, but it isn't so it can't replace the linefeed character with something more compatible with the system.  Add to the fact that CRM utilizes XML for almost all of the data transportation between and around the system, and you create a situation where certain data operations get confused and refuse to work properly until the linefeed character is removed.

How do I know if I have corrupted data?

If you would like to check your database directly to see if corrupted data exists within your CRM Contact records, perform the following steps:

1) Open SQL Query Analyzer.

2) Enter and execute the following Query

select * from contactbase where jobtitle like '%' + char(10) +'%'

3) If any corrupted records exist, they will be displayed in the Results window.

Correcting the Data

This morning I released a simple scan and fix utility to the Premium Content section of my company web site.  It's free, but registration is required.

When you first run the utility, it will offer you a chance to scan the Contacts Entity to locate Job Titles that contain the linefeed character - just like the above SQL script does.

If you wish, you may then choose the Fix any problem records.  The utility will replace the linefeed character with a space and update the Contact records.

Feedback

If anyone has any feedback, please let me know.  There could be other Entities and Attributes that could contain similar invalid data so if you run into anything else like this, please let me know so I can modify the utility accordingly.