We're very excited about many enhancements in our forthcoming major release of Import-O-Matic, but probably one of the best parts is the new "dictionary translation" functionality. With 1.8 you will be able to translate data fields from any value to another. So, say for instance you are importing gift data from a website, and the "source page" field is used to indicate which appeal is to be used for the gift. With dictionaries you will be able to specify how those page names should be translated, preventing you from having to manually massage the data in your source file. Another example... say you are importing educational degrees from an outside system that is either free text or uses different abbreviations than your system. Again, you could create a dictionary and translate all the values like "Doctorate", "Ph.D", "PH D", and "PhD." to the desired "PhD". Dictionaries are defined outside of profiles so you can use any dictionary in multiple profiles. Below are some screenshots showing how dictionaries are defined and applied to a field in a profile, using an example of standardizing Title values. 

1) Create a dictionary:

2) Apply the dictionary translation to a column in your source file:

3) Enjoy clean, standardized data without manually massaging your import files!

We look forward to your feedback on this... what do you think?

Very cool! Also wanted to give a shout out for implementing the functionality to hook up with Finder #'s using Blackbaud Direct Marketing! It was on my list to determine if IOM worked with BBDM, and you answered it before I even asked. :)

Thanks Faith! We worked with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to integrate Import-O-Matic with Blackbaud's Direct Marketing module and have got some great results withit. Let us know when you want to take it for a spin (though it should pretty much "just work" when you check the BBDM checkbox and have a Finder Number in your profile).

Dictionaries is becoming HUGE. H-U-G-E. Maybe even HUGE. There is hardly an implementation that goes by these days where we don't lean on that functionality heavily to avoid having to massage data before an import. I don't know how we ever got by without it. Looking forward to hearing your feedback on it and all the other cool stuff in 1.8!

-Jeff