Migration Playbook

FuseDesk Enchant

FuseDesk to Enchant: The Complete Migration Playbook

A 35-step runbook across six phases — track your progress, and open the right tool at every step.

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TL;DR

FuseDesk to Enchant migration requires mapping Cases to Tickets, Departments to Inboxes, and Reps to Users, while navigating dual API rate limits (1,800/hr and 100/min) and the loss of CRM-linked data.

Migrating from FuseDesk to Enchant requires a fully custom API-driven migration pipeline, as no native migration path exists between the two platforms. FuseDesk is architecturally coupled to the Keap/Infusionsoft CRM ecosystem, organizing data around departments, CRM-linked contacts, and case history, while Enchant operates on a flat, inbox-centric model built around tickets, customers, and labels. The core engineering challenge is decoupling CRM-bound data structures from FuseDesk's API and remapping them to Enchant's minimal data model without losing conversation history or customer context. Additional custom work includes manually rebuilding automation rules, canned responses, SLA policies, and knowledge base content, as these cannot be transferred programmatically.

Read this first

Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.

CRM data loss is the biggest risk

FuseDesk stores Infusionsoft/Keap Contact IDs and Company IDs on every case and contact. Enchant has no equivalent CRM linkage. If you need to preserve this association, write the CRM IDs into the Enchant customer summary field or maintain an external mapping table before you begin.

Identity mapping is non-negotiable

When you create a ticket or message in Enchant via the API, you must specify the user_id of the author. If you fail to map a former FuseDesk Rep who is no longer with the company, your script will either fail or default to assigning those historical replies to your API admin account, destroying historical accuracy. For deleted reps, create a placeholder "Legacy Agent" user in Enchant and map their ID to preserve the visual context of a staff reply.

Status mapping detail

FuseDesk uses three statuses — new, open, and closed. Enchant supports open, hold, closed, snoozed, and archived. Map FuseDesk new and open to Enchant open, and closed to closed. If you want to distinguish "waiting on customer" cases, use Enchant's hold state, but FuseDesk doesn't have a native equivalent — you'd need to identify these from case tags or CRM data.

Batch extraction tip

If you have 5,000+ cases, the per-case detail fetch alone consumes 5,000+ API calls. At 1,800/hour, that's nearly 3 hours just for extraction. Run extraction overnight and store results locally as JSON before starting the import.

Base64 encoding inflates file size by ~33%

Large attachments will hit HTTP payload limits. Test with your largest files early. Write exception handling to catch upload errors, log the failed attachment, and append a text note to the ticket indicating an attachment was dropped.

Run a dry-run first

Import 50–100 cases into a test Enchant instance before doing the full migration. This catches mapping errors, encoding issues, and rate-limit surprises before they affect production data.

The runbook

Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.

01 Discovery Establish why you are moving, what "done" means, and who signs off. 0/5

Objective A written scope with agreed success criteria, a named owner per workstream, and a budget approved by finance.

  1. Pull the real numbers out of FuseDesk

    Support ops 1 day

    Export counts for tickets (open and closed separately), contacts, organisations, attachments, macros, triggers, automations, views and SLA policies. Note the oldest ticket date — history depth drives the whole timeline. Estimating from memory is the single most common cause of a blown migration window.

    Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory
  2. Decide what history actually moves

    Support lead 2 days

    Agree a cut-off with the support lead: all history, last 24 months, or open tickets plus a read-only archive. Every extra year of closed tickets adds API time and cost without adding much agent value. Get this in writing — it is the decision people relitigate mid-cutover.

    A "move everything" default is what turns a two-week migration into a two-month one.

    COI & ROI Calculator Build the 36-month business case you will need for sign-off
  3. Confirm Enchant can hold your support model

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Walk your current workflow through Enchant: multi-brand, business hours, SLA targets, CSAT, side conversations, public vs internal notes, and any channel you depend on (voice, chat, WhatsApp, social). List anything with no native equivalent — those are project risks, not configuration details.

  4. Build the business case

    Project sponsor 1-2 days

    Model licence delta, migration effort, agent retraining, and the cost of staying put (Cost of Inaction). Executives approve a number, not a plan, and you will be asked for it again at the go/no-go.

    Helpdesk Migration Planner Turn ticket volume into a dated FuseDesk → Enchant timeline
  5. Name owners and set the go/no-go date

    Project manager 1 day

    One named owner each for data, configuration, integrations, and agent enablement, plus a decision-maker who can call a rollback. Put the go/no-go meeting in calendars now, 48 hours before the freeze.

Don't move on until

  • Record counts confirmed for tickets, contacts, organisations and macros
  • Success criteria signed off by the support lead
  • Freeze window provisionally booked with the business
02 Data Audit Find out what is actually in the data before you try to move it. 0/6

Objective A profiled, cleaned export with every quality defect either fixed at source or explicitly accepted.

  1. Take a full FuseDesk export and profile it

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Export to CSV or JSON and profile every file: row counts, null rates per column, distinct values, and type consistency. Compare row counts against the API totals from Discovery — a gap here means your export is silently truncated, usually by pagination.

    Data Profiler Profile the FuseDesk export for nulls, outliers and type drift
  2. Validate file structure before anyone writes a transform

    Data engineer 1 day

    Check delimiters, quoting, encoding (expect UTF-8, watch for BOMs and Latin-1), duplicate headers, and embedded newlines in ticket bodies. Ticket descriptions with raw newlines and commas break naive CSV parsers and silently shift columns.

    A single unescaped quote in one ticket body can shift every subsequent column without any error.

    CSV Validator Catch broken headers and ragged rows in the raw export
  3. Inventory PII and set retention

    Compliance / DPO 2 days

    Scan for emails, phone numbers, payment card fragments, national IDs and anything else regulated in ticket bodies and custom fields — support tickets are where customers paste things they should not. Decide what gets migrated, masked, or dropped, and record the legal basis.

    Ticket bodies and attachments routinely contain card and ID data that never appears in a structured field.

    PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system
  4. Quantify duplicates, orphans and dead references

    Support ops 1-2 days

    Count duplicate contacts (same email, different casing), tickets whose requester no longer exists, organisations with no members, and attachments whose parent ticket is gone. Fix these in FuseDesk where you can — migrating them just moves the mess.

    Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns
  5. Clean and normalise the export

    Data engineer 2 days

    Trim whitespace, drop empty rows and columns, normalise casing on emails and tags, and standardise every timestamp to UTC ISO 8601. Timezone drift is invisible at load time and shows up weeks later as SLA reports nobody can reconcile.

  6. Produce a masked copy for sandbox work

    Data engineer 0.5 day

    Generate a realistic but fake version of the export for testing and for any vendor who needs sample data. Loading real customer PII into a sandbox is a breach in most jurisdictions, and sandboxes are rarely covered by your DPA.

    PII Masker Generate a safe copy for sandbox and vendor testing

FuseDesk → Enchant specifics

Departments
GET /api/v1/departments/all (returns active and archived)
Contacts
Extracted from case data (linked via contactid)

Don't move on until

  • Export parses cleanly with no ragged rows or encoding errors
  • PII inventory complete and retention decisions recorded
  • Duplicate and orphan records quantified and triaged
03 Field Mapping Turn two schemas into one signed-off mapping spec. 0/6

Objective A reviewed field-level mapping covering every object, with an explicit decision for every field that has no target.

  1. Generate the first-pass FuseDesk → Enchant field map

    Solution architect 2 days

    Start from an automated match on both schemas, then review every row by hand. Automated matching gets the obvious 70% right and is confidently wrong on the rest — especially anything named "type", "status" or "custom_field_1".

    Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the FuseDesk → Enchant field pair
  2. Map status, priority and channel values, not just field names

    Support lead 1-2 days

    Enumerate every value in each picklist on both sides and map them explicitly. Value-level mismatches are the defect class that survives all the way to production because the field itself mapped fine — a ticket that should be "Pending" arriving as "Open" reopens SLA clocks.

    Statuses with no target equivalent (on-hold, pending-customer) need a policy decision, not a best guess.

  3. Decide how custom fields land

    Solution architect 2 days

    Create the target custom fields first, matching type exactly (a dropdown mapped to free text can never be mapped back). Where Enchant has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.

  4. Resolve identity and threading

    Data engineer 1 day

    Decide how source IDs are preserved — most platforms will not let you set the primary key, so keep the original ID in a custom field. Without it, reconciliation becomes fuzzy matching and every future support question about an old ticket is unanswerable.

    Losing the original ticket ID makes reconciliation and rollback effectively impossible.

  5. Plan attachments, inline images and threading order

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Confirm size limits, allowed MIME types, and whether inline images survive as attachments or need rehosting. Decide the comment ordering and author attribution rules: comments loaded out of order, or all attributed to the API user, destroy the conversation history agents rely on.

  6. Freeze and sign off the mapping spec

    Project manager 1 day

    Version the spec, walk the support lead through it row by row, and get explicit sign-off. Any change after this point goes through change control — mid-flight mapping edits are how partial loads happen.

Don't move on until

  • Every source field is mapped, deliberately dropped, or parked in a custom field
  • Status, priority and channel value maps agreed with the support lead
  • Mapping spec version-controlled and signed off
04 Test Migration Prove the pipeline on a small, representative slice. 0/6

Objective A pilot load into a Enchant sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.

  1. Stand up a Enchant sandbox that matches production config

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Create the custom fields, groups, brands, business hours and SLA policies first. A pilot into a default sandbox tests nothing, because the failures you care about are all configuration mismatches.

  2. Pick a deliberately nasty pilot sample

    Data engineer 0.5 day

    Take 500-1000 records chosen for difficulty, not convenience: the longest ticket threads, tickets with the most attachments, non-Latin character sets, merged and split tickets, deleted requesters, and every status value. A clean random sample proves only that easy records are easy.

  3. Run the load with masked data and instrument everything

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Log every API request and response with its source record ID. When 40 records fail out of 10,000 you need to know exactly which ones and why, without re-running the whole batch.

    PII Masker Never load real customer PII into a sandbox
  4. Measure real throughput against the rate limit

    Data engineer 1 day

    Record achieved records-per-hour under Enchant's actual rate limits, including retries and backoff. Extrapolate to the full volume: if the maths says the full load exceeds your freeze window, you fix that now, not on cutover night.

    Published rate limits are ceilings, not throughput. Assume real-world rates are meaningfully lower once retries and backoff are counted.

  5. Reconcile the pilot and triage every failure

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Diff source against target on record counts and field-level values. Every discrepancy gets a root cause and a fix — "probably fine" at pilot scale becomes thousands of broken records at full scale.

    Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up
  6. Put real agents in front of the pilot data

    Support lead 2 days

    Have two or three agents work sample tickets end to end in the sandbox. They find the things reconciliation cannot see: unreadable threading, missing context, macros that no longer make sense. Fix the mapping, then re-run.

Don't move on until

  • Pilot batch reconciles to 100% on record counts
  • Agents have reviewed sample tickets and confirmed they are workable
  • Measured throughput extrapolates to a viable full-load window
05 Cutover Execute the switch inside a controlled, reversible window. 0/6

Objective All in-scope data live in Enchant, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.

  1. Pre-load history before the freeze

    Data engineer 3-10 days

    Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while FuseDesk stays live. Only open tickets and the final delta need to move inside the freeze — this is the single biggest lever on window length.

    Helpdesk Migration Planner Size the freeze window from Enchant's real API limits
  2. Publish the runbook with times, owners and abort criteria

    Project manager 1 day

    A timed sequence: freeze start, final export, delta load, channel switch, smoke test, go/no-go, agent switch. Name who does each step and the explicit condition that triggers a rollback. Decide the abort criteria before the night, when nobody wants to be the one to call it.

  3. Freeze FuseDesk and take the final delta

    Support ops 2-4 hours

    Stop new ticket creation, let agents finish in-flight replies, then export everything changed since the pre-load. Announce the freeze to the whole business, not just support — someone always tries to raise a ticket during it.

    Tickets created during an unenforced freeze land in the old system and are the most common source of permanently lost data.

  4. Load the delta and open tickets

    Data engineer 2-6 hours

    Run the delta load, then reconcile counts before touching any channel. Do not repoint email until the delta has verified — an inbound ticket arriving mid-load is far harder to untangle than a few extra minutes of freeze.

    Migration Validation Tool Confirm the final delta landed before you reopen
  5. Repoint channels and verify with live traffic

    IT / integrations 2-4 hours

    Switch email forwarding and MX or connector settings, update chat widgets and web forms, and re-authorise integrations. Then send real test tickets through every channel and confirm each lands, routes and triggers the right automation.

    Email forwarding changes can take up to a full DNS TTL to propagate — check the TTL days in advance and lower it if needed.

    Cron Expression Builder Schedule the delta syncs that run through the freeze
  6. Run the go/no-go and switch the agents

    Project sponsor 1-2 hours

    Walk the exit criteria with the decision-maker, call it explicitly, then move agents over with a named person on hand for the first few hours. Keep FuseDesk read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.

FuseDesk → Enchant specifics

Initial sync
Run the full migration script up to the current date. Your team continues working in FuseDesk.
The delta
Once the initial sync completes, run a modified script that queries FuseDesk only for cases created or modified after the start date of your initial sync.

Don't move on until

  • Full historical load complete and counts matched
  • Inbound channels repointed and verified with live test tickets
  • Rollback decision point passed explicitly, not by default
06 Validation Prove the migration is complete, then close it out. 0/6

Objective Documented evidence that data, workflow and reporting all survived, and a signed acceptance.

  1. Run the full reconciliation

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Compare source and target on every object: total counts, counts by status, counts by group, attachment counts, and field-level spot checks on a random sample. Produce one report you can hand to an auditor.

    Migration Validation Tool Reconcile FuseDesk and Enchant record-for-record
  2. Verify field completeness, not just record counts

    Data engineer 1 day

    Re-profile the loaded data and compare null rates per field against the source profile. Matching record counts with a field that silently arrived empty is the failure mode counts alone will never catch.

    Data Profiler Prove field completeness held up through the load
  3. Rebuild reporting and compare against baselines

    Support ops 2-3 days

    Recreate your core dashboards — volume, first response time, resolution time, CSAT — and compare to pre-migration figures for the same period. Explain every variance; a changed SLA calculation is a real finding, not a rounding error.

    SLA and first-response metrics are usually recalculated from the loaded timestamps, so they will differ if any timestamp mapping was approximate.

  4. Test the workflow layer end to end

    Support ops 2 days

    Fire every trigger, automation, SLA escalation, macro and notification with a live ticket. Workflow does not migrate — it gets rebuilt — so it is untested until someone has actually watched it run.

  5. Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail

    Compliance / DPO 1 day

    Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Enchant, and file the evidence with your PII decisions from the audit phase.

    PII & Compliance Scanner Produce the compliance evidence your auditor will ask for
  6. Sign off, then decommission on a schedule

    Project sponsor 1 day

    Get written acceptance against the Discovery success criteria. Keep FuseDesk read-only for an agreed period (30-90 days is typical), take a final archive export, and only then cancel. Diarise the decommission date so it does not quietly renew.

FuseDesk → Enchant specifics

Ticket counts
Compare total cases extracted from FuseDesk against total tickets in Enchant using GET /api/v1/tickets?count=true.
Message counts
Spot-check 50+ tickets across different size buckets. Verify message counts match case history lengths.
Customer deduplication
Verify no duplicate customer records were created.
Label accuracy
Confirm case tags mapped correctly to labels.
State accuracy
Verify closed FuseDesk cases show as closed in Enchant, not left open from the creation step.

Don't move on until

  • Full reconciliation report attached to the project record
  • Reporting baselines match pre-migration figures within agreed tolerance
  • Formal acceptance signed and archive retention scheduled

Field mapping reference

The field-by-field mapping for each object. Use this as the starting point for your mapping spec.

Departments Inboxes 3 fields low

Departments map directly to Enchant inboxes with minimal structural difference, though inboxes must be pre-created manually in the admin UI and a lookup table must be maintained for the import pipeline.

FuseDesk fieldEnchant fieldNotes
departmentid inbox_id Store mapping for ticket import
name Inbox name Set during Enchant inbox setup
repids — Enchant doesn't restrict users to inboxes via API
Reps Users 3 fields high

Agents cannot be created via Enchant's API and must be invited manually, and any unmapped or departed reps will cause the migration script to fail or default all historical replies to the API admin account, destroying attribution accuracy.

FuseDesk fieldEnchant fieldNotes
repid user_id Map for ticket assignment
Rep name first_name, last_name
Rep email email
Contacts Customers 6 fields medium

FuseDesk contacts are CRM-linked records and Enchant customers are standalone entities, so CRM identifiers such as Infusionsoft Contact IDs must be manually preserved in the summary field or they are permanently lost.

FuseDesk fieldEnchant fieldNotes
contactid / contactUuid customer_id
Name (from CRM) first_name, last_name
Email contacts [].value (type: email)
Phone contacts [].value (type: phone)
Infusionsoft Contact ID summary Preserve as reference
Company ID summary No native company field in Enchant
Cases Tickets 8 fields medium

Cases map reasonably well to Enchant tickets, but status normalization (new/open to open), channel type coercion to email, and dependency on pre-mapped customer and user IDs introduce moderate risk of data loss or misattribution.

FuseDesk fieldEnchant fieldNotes
caseid client_id Use for idempotency
summary subject
status (new, open, closed) state (open, hold, closed) Map new → open
depid inbox_id Use department mapping
repid user_id Use rep mapping
contactid customer_id Use contact mapping
date_opened created_at Override default timestamp
casetags label_ids Use label mapping
Case His ry 4 fields high

Conversation history requires strict chronological ordering, correct direction mapping for inbound and outbound replies, and valid user_id resolution for every message; gaps in rep mapping or out-of-order insertion will corrupt conversation threads.

FuseDesk fieldEnchant fieldNotes
email (inbound) reply (direction: in)
email (outbound) reply (direction: out) Requires user_id
note note Requires user_id
call note No call type in Enchant — prepend " [Phone Call]" to body

Risk matrix

Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.

ObjectRiskNotes
Cases (Tickets) medium Cases map reasonably well to Enchant tickets, but status normalization (new/open to open), channel type coercion to email, and dependency on pre-mapped customer and user IDs introduce moderate risk of data loss or misattribution.
Case History (Messages) high Conversation history requires strict chronological ordering, correct direction mapping for inbound and outbound replies, and valid user_id resolution for every message; gaps in rep mapping or out-of-order insertion will corrupt conversation threads.
Contacts (Customers) medium FuseDesk contacts are CRM-linked records and Enchant customers are standalone entities, so CRM identifiers such as Infusionsoft Contact IDs must be manually preserved in the summary field or they are permanently lost.
Departments (Inboxes) low Departments map directly to Enchant inboxes with minimal structural difference, though inboxes must be pre-created manually in the admin UI and a lookup table must be maintained for the import pipeline.
Reps (Users) high Agents cannot be created via Enchant's API and must be invited manually, and any unmapped or departed reps will cause the migration script to fail or default all historical replies to the API admin account, destroying attribution accuracy.
Case Tags (Labels) low Case tags map directly to Enchant labels and the tag list can be fetched from FuseDesk via API, though labels must be pre-created in the Enchant admin UI as no label creation endpoint exists in the public API.
Attachments high Attachments add significant API call volume on top of already constrained rate limits and must be uploaded separately per message, increasing total migration time and the risk of partial or missing file transfers.
Automation Rules and Workflows high FuseDesk automation rules and workflows have no programmatic migration path to Enchant and must be fully rebuilt manually in the Enchant admin UI, with no guarantee of functional equivalence between the two platforms.
Anonymized or Archived Records high FuseDesk PRO and Enterprise plans support automatic anonymization that irreversibly scrubs PII including names, emails, and phone numbers, making those records unmigrateable in any meaningful way.
Canned Responses and Templates medium Canned responses, email templates, and note templates cannot be migrated via API and must be rebuilt manually in Enchant, with FuseDesk-specific merge fields requiring manual reformatting to match Enchant's template syntax.

The hard parts

What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.

CRM Identity Decoupling

FuseDesk stores Infusionsoft/Keap Contact IDs and Company IDs on every case and contact record, and Enchant has no native CRM linkage fields, requiring these identifiers to be manually preserved in Enchant's free-text customer summary field or an external mapping table.

Agent Identity Mapping

Enchant does not expose a user creation endpoint in its public API, requiring agents to be invited manually through the admin UI before migration begins, and departed reps must be handled via placeholder accounts to preserve historical reply attribution.

Label and Inbox Pre-Creation

Neither Enchant inboxes nor labels can be created via the public API, so all inboxes and labels must be manually configured in the Enchant admin UI prior to import, with IDs retrieved via API to build the required lookup tables.

Rate Limit Constraints

FuseDesk enforces approximately 1,800 API calls per hour while Enchant enforces 100 credits per minute with a 6-request-per-second burst cap, meaning a 10,000-ticket migration with average message volume requires over 50,000 API calls and approximately 9+ hours of import time.

Message Type and Channel Normalization

Enchant's API only supports ticket creation with an email type, so FuseDesk cases originating from phone calls or live chat must be imported as email-type tickets with channel context preserved via labels or notes.

Strict Dependency Import Order

Enchant's data model enforces a strict hierarchical dependency chain where customers must exist before tickets and tickets must exist before messages, requiring the migration pipeline to follow a precise creation order to avoid foreign key failures.

Tools used in this playbook

All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

FAQ

Can I migrate FuseDesk cases to Enchant automatically?

Yes, but only via custom scripts using both APIs. There is no native import tool. You extract cases from FuseDesk's REST API and create tickets in Enchant's REST API, respecting both platforms' rate limits.

What data is lost when migrating from FuseDesk to Enchant?

CRM-specific data is the biggest loss — Infusionsoft/Keap Contact IDs, Company IDs, CRM tags, campaign links, and merge-field templates have no Enchant equivalent. Chat widget configs, Zapier integrations, and automation workflows also don't transfer.

Can I migrate custom fields from FuseDesk to Enchant?

Enchant does not support custom fields on tickets. You must either map discrete custom field values to Enchant Labels or inject the custom data as an internal note on the migrated ticket.

How long does a FuseDesk to Enchant migration take?

A small account (under 1,000 cases) can be migrated in half a day. Medium accounts (1,000–10,000 cases) typically take 1-2 days. Large accounts with 10,000+ cases and attachments can take 3-5 days due to API rate limits on both sides.

How do I handle attachments during the migration?

FuseDesk doesn't expose a dedicated attachment download endpoint, so you may need to extract files from your CRM or email system. On the Enchant side, upload files as Base64-encoded data via the attachments API, then reference the returned ID when creating the message.

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