CiviCRM will have to support the import of data from a variety of sources.

Primary sources will be:
Outlook

Secondary sources:

Other considerations:
User has three addresses: Primary, Alternate, and Business. They should be able to import them as three locations and maintain the location type coding (Primary, Alternate, and Business).

Interfacing with external DBs for bulk mailing

(contributed by John Springer, Tech Dude, Democratic Party of Oregon, john @ dpo dot org)

There is the interesting problem to anticipate of NCOA corrections
and bulk mail addressing.

Periodically, you want to run your list through both CASS and NCOA,
which delivers corrected address information. Getting the NCOA
back into the database intelligently isn't always easy. Some
forethought might save trouble later.
An interface to a CASS package and NCOA service would be awful nice.

When you address bulk mail, the PO wants it all UPPER CASE, but
when you send out a nice letter you want It In Sentence Case probably.
Which means you want a way to deliver the same data in two different
formats.

(from "Ted Fickes" <lists@eagleriverpartners.com> on riders-talk@npogroups.org

Some of the groups using Raisers Edge keep a completely separate list
in GetActive and I haven't seen (yet) evidence of integration...getting
activist data from GetActive into the member/donor list in Raisers
Edge. Or vice versa. That's a completely different issue (mostly).

Workflow I'm interested in:

1) Group exports id number, name and contact info to a file.

2) file is run through postal standardization and address updating.

3) file is run against voter file, census and other data sources to add
new fields. All very standardized.

Bring file back to the group using Raisers Edge (and other groups using
a host of other systems but RE is the most problematic/pervasive b/c
it's the most widely used proprietary system and typically used by
groups with very large lists...upper five to six digits or more).

Perhaps group using RE can add new fields for some of the new data.
Perhaps not. Perhaps they can add fields but not sure if/how to get new
fields into the data. Perhaps they want to update the address info,
perhaps not.

But typically the group had Blackbaud load their legacy data into RE
and
teach them how to add new records and data on records. Importing
new/enhanced data is a whole different ball of acid. Not being able to
get it in there and make the new data 'live' with the funder/donor info
is problematic.

There's lots of ways to tackle this. Just wondering if any list members
have thoughts/experience here.