Migrate from House-on-the-Hill Service Desk to Salesforce Service Cloud

House-on-the-Hill Contact records export as a separate CSV from the Settings Cog interface. We map Name, Email, Phone, and any custom contact fields to the Salesforce Contact object. Contact is loaded first because every Case requires a ContactId lookup. Email address serves as the dedupe key; we flag duplicate contacts by email before insert to prevent multiple records pointing to one person.

Companies (organisations) export from House-on-the-Hill as a separate database table. We map company name and domain to Salesforce Account Name and Website. Account is created before Contact import so that AccountId is available for the Contact-Account relationship. Where House-on-the-Hill stores a flat contact model without organisational linkage, we create a holding Account named after the contact's email domain for use as the parent Account.

House-on-the-Hill tickets export via Settings Cog > More Tools as a flat CSV. We map ticket reference number, subject, description, status, priority, and created/updated timestamps to Salesforce Case fields. Source status values map to Salesforce Case Status picklist entries, and source priority maps to Case Priority. ContactId is resolved at import time by matching the ticket's customer email against the migrated Contact records. Case Number is generated by Salesforce after insert and cannot be pre-set.

Ticket conversations (public replies and internal notes) export as a related table linked to each ticket by ticket reference number. Public replies migrate to Salesforce EmailMessage records linked to the parent Case via ParentId; internal notes migrate to CaseComment. We preserve the original author email, body text, and creation timestamp. Thread ordering is maintained by setting EmailMessage.CreatedDate to the original House-on-the-Hill timestamp. This migration requires the Case to be inserted first so that the ParentId lookup can be resolved.

Agent accounts are stored in a distinct House-on-the-Hill database but the HTTPS Report API does not expose agent records. We export agent data from the UI CSV export where available and map Agent Name and Email to Salesforce User records. OwnerId on Case is resolved by matching agent email against the migrated User table. Agents without a matching Salesforce User are held in a reconciliation queue for the customer's admin to provision before case import resumes.

File attachments in House-on-the-Hill are stored in the document management area and linked to tickets by internal document ID. The ticket CSV does not embed attachment binary data. We export all attachment records as a separate pass and use the migrated Case IDs returned by our import engine to re-establish the ticket-to-document linkage in Salesforce. This two-phase approach requires the Case to exist before the ContentDocumentLink is created. Each attachment is inserted as a ContentVersion (binary), then linked to the Case via a ContentDocumentLink record with LinkedEntityId pointing to the Case ID.

SLA policies and their association with tickets are not independently exportable from House-on-the-Hill ticket record. We extract SLA name, breach time, and SLA-to-ticket assignments from the ticket export where present. In Salesforce, we recreate SLA rules as Entitlement Processes scoped to the relevant Account or Contact, and map the original SLA name to the Entitlement Process Name and breach time to First Response Target and Resolution Target. Ticket-level SLA assignments migrate as Entitlement records linked to the Case.

KB articles export as structured records from House-on-the-Hill with title, body, category, and any custom article fields. We map article title to Salesforce Knowledge Article Title, article body to Summary and Body fields, and category to Salesforce data category assignments. Salesforce Knowledge requires article types to be configured in Setup before articles can be imported; we create the article type and data category structure before migration begins. Article versioning and translation fields do not migrate unless present in the source export.

Custom ticket and contact fields defined in the House-on-the-Hill form designer export as additional columns in the respective CSV. We inspect the field schema via the CSV export template, then pre-create each custom field in Salesforce using the equivalent Salesforce field type (text, number, date, picklist, checkbox). Dropdown-style custom fields in House-on-the-Hill map to Salesforce picklist with the same allowed values. Custom field API names are matched to the source field names with a __c suffix per Salesforce convention.

Tags are a flat label system applied to tickets in House-on-the-Hill. We export tags as a comma-separated string per ticket and split them into individual values during transformation. If the tag volume is under 500 unique values, we create a Salesforce multi-select picklist field on Case and insert the tag values at import time. If the tag volume exceeds picklist limits, we map to a separate Tag object and CaseTag junction table as an alternative.