Siebel Marketing User Guide > List Management > Importing and Managing External Lists >

Prerequisites for Importing External Lists

Before importing a list, you need to perform the following tasks:

• Verifying Status of Server Components and Tasks
• Verifying Data Quality Settings
• Validating the Structure of the Incoming Data

Verifying Status of Server Components and Tasks

Before importing a list, you need to verify that server components are enabled and that server tasks are running.

To enable server components and run tasks, you use the Administration - Server Configuration screen, Components view. For more information, see the Siebel System Administration Guide.

Make sure that the following server components are enabled and the following server tasks are running:

• List Import Service Manager: Enabled.

  Clicking Launch Import in the List Import view tab of the List Management screen submits the import request. The actual import is performed by the List Manager server component on the Siebel Server.

• Server Request Processor: Running.
• Server Request Broker: Enabled or running.

To import a list, you must be connected to the Siebel Server. If the Siebel client cannot detect a running Siebel Server at the time you launch the import, you will receive a warning message. You can continue to submit the import request if you are sure that a Siebel Server will be available to handle the request later.

For the request to be queued, you must have a Siebel Gateway Name Server running in the background. The request will be routed through the gateway name server to a Siebel Server that has the List Import Service Manager server component enabled. If you do not have a gateway name server running, you will receive an error message saying "Unable to connect to gateway name server."

Verifying Data Quality Settings

When you use the optional Data Quality module, you should verify your settings for the following server components before importing files:

• Data Quality Manager.
• List Import Service Manager.
• The object manager for the application in which your users promote prospects. For example, if you promote prospects using Call Center, you need to enable the Call Center Object Manager.

If you need to enable a server component, see Siebel Marketing Installation and Administration Guide. For more information about data quality configuration, see Siebel Data Quality Administration Guide.

1. Verify that these server components are set to Enabled.
2. Verify the component parameters for these server components are set for deduplication and data cleansing.
   • If you want to enable Data Matching, use the Components view in the Administration - Server Configuration screen and query for each of these server components. Click the Component Parameters view tab and query for the DeDuplication parameters. The DeDuplication Enable Flag should be set to TRUE.
   • If you want to enable Data Cleansing during import, query for the Data Cleansing parameters. The Data Cleansing Enable Flag should be set to TRUE.
3. Verify the matching threshold for List Import. The Match Threshold setting in the Data Quality Settings view of the Data Administration screen determines if an incoming name is considered a match with existing data. To specify a different threshold for List Import than the rest of the Data Quality module, navigate to the Components view of the Administration - Server Configuration screen and select the List Import Service Manager. Click Component Parameters and query for Dedup Threshold. Set the value to the match score threshold that you want to apply to the List Import utility.

   CAUTION:  Reboot Siebel Server before launching any import tasks so that new parameter values take effect.

4. Make sure that you set the Data Quality Settings in the Data Administration screen. You should generate and refresh the match keys for the existing contact and prospect data before importing any files.

Validating the Structure of the Incoming Data

Some columns for a prospect correspond to an LOV (List of Values) or MLOV (Multilingual List of Values) field in the application. Be sure that your incoming data for these columns only use values from the LOV or MLOV. Any nonmatching values will automatically be set to NULL in the new prospect record.

The date format is set by the system settings for the machine on which the Siebel Server is running. For date fields, you should make sure you use the correct date format that corresponds to the locale settings for your Siebel environment.