After a succesful conversion of data Transnational Institute (www.tni.org) will start using CiviCRM to manager their relations today.
They had been using FileMaker to manage their relations for a number of years, but had changed to Open Source technology. On top of that the functionality of their solutions was not really up-to-date, and they wanted a more structured approach so that it would be easier to get information from the system.
After an initial meeting they selected us www.ee-atwork.nl) to support the implementation of CiviCRM.

They used different ways to group and structure their data in FileMaker (which language do people speak, what kind of projects are they interested in, what types of organization do we know, what publications do relations want to receive etc.). We translated those into a combination of relationships, groups, tags and activities in CiviCRM.
We developed the conversion with PHP/MySQL, loading the data from FileMaker and using the standard CiviCRM API's to populate the Civi database. With data from the first complete test conversion we trained their staff last week, and did a successfull final conversion this weekend.

TNI now has a more structured setup of their data, which allows them to do their necessary things in an easier and faster way. The functionality of CiviCRM gives them also far more possibilities like managing contributions, events and activities. A nice project!
Erik