Loading data into CiviCRM for a Dutch Housing Corporation

We started a project with a Dutch Housing Corporation called 'De Goede Woning' 2 months ago. They use CiviCRM to get a grip on their requirements towards a CRM-package. It is very possible that they will use CiviCRM after the project, but the objective is to understand what CRM means and what is needed for their specific situation. We use bog-standard CiviCRM (version 3.02 on Drupal 6.14 with the Dutch translation) with CiviCase. If you want to know more about the project, let me know! I love telling stories about our projects :-) Right now I want to focus on the interface we created. De Goede Woning uses a main information system called First (based on Oracle) that holds all their houses and transactions. And to get a good go at prototyping we wanted to load some of the data (customers and suppliers) into CiviCRM. We have developed an interface (using PHP and MySQL) that reads their data and then populates CiviCRM with Organizations, Households and Individuals, using the CiviCRM API's. We also establish a relationship between the household and the individual, and populate some custom data. For households we have loaded the basic data (name, address, phone etc.) and on top of that show :

• the code of the unit the customer rent if applicable
• the rent they are charged
• the number of years they have rented with De Goede Woning
• the start and end date of the rental periode
For individuals we have the 'burger service nummer' as custom data. For organizations we load two administrative codes as additional information. There are some parts of the interface that required a little additional attention:
• Establishing the link between a Household and an Individual can be done quite easily using the API civicrm_relationship_create. On top of that we wanted the Individual to use the Household address, and this has to be done separately by repeating the household_id in the parameter mail_to_household_id in the API civicrm_contact_add.
• There is no API for Custom Data, so these were populated directly into the database. For more information on this, give me a shout!
On our website you can find a blog with screenprints and more detailed information.....both in Dutch and in English. Erik Hommel, EE-atWork
Filed under
CiviCRM