Migrating your Parature Help Desk data to Zendesk

Microsoft announced it will drop support for parature customers in May 2018:

Customers may continue to use Parature per the terms of their agreement, and it will be supported until either their migration has been completed, or until May 15, 2018, at which point all support for Parature ends and the service will be terminated. Customers who choose not to migrate will have 90 days after the service is discontinued on May 15, 2018 to retrieve their data.

For customers who do not want to lose their data Helpando.it offers a Parature to Zendesk migration.

Steps of a Parature to Zendesk migration

How to get the data out of Parature?

In general there are 3 ways to get your data out of Parature.

The Parature web interface
Parature provides an export functionality over their web interface (Setup->Data management->Export data).
Based on our experiences requesting an export creates timeout errors and can only be used for very small accounts with less than 10.000 tickets.

The Parature API
Yes, Parature provides API access. Unfortunately though the API only allows for 120 requests per minute which is why the API is not a good option for a larger data export.

Requesting a data export from Parature Support
This is the preferred way to go.
All you need to do is to write an email to support@parature.com

Make sure you include your “Account ID” and your “Department ID” and ask Parature to provide a full export of your data (including all file attachments if you need attachments) in CSV format.
The turnaround time for Data Dumps can be several days (5 – 10 days), it is a good idea to request the dump as soon as you know you will migrate away from Parature.

Parature will ask to provide them with the login credentials for a FTP Server where they can upload your data.
In case you do not have an FTP server we can provide one.

Parature will provide many different files, in the past all we usually needed were the following entities:

 

Parature Entity	Migrates to Zendesk as	Comments
Ticket	Tickets	The ticket file also includes custom ticket field information
Ticket History	Comments
Ticket History Attachment	Ticket & Comment Attachments
Users	Agents
Customers	End-users
Account	Organizations	Optional
Article	Help Center Article	Optional

What happens after Parature has provided the data export?

• We’ll need access to the data. The easiest way is to provide Parature with our FTP account in the first place as we then can directly access the data once it’s there
• We’ll need a day or two to import your data and run some analyses
• We’ll let you know about statistics and exactly how many tickets and other entities were included in your dump
• You add us as an admin to your target Zendesk account
• We’ll provide a test migration of some randomly selected test tickets
• We do as many test migrations as necessary until you are satisfied with the result

Interested in a data migration from Parature to Zendesk?

Request a FREE quote now

If you’d like to read more about Zendesk migrations, check out our post about The Basics of a Zendesk Migration.