Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Managed solutions - a nightmare - how to get rid of them?

Hi all

Currently all changes on our live environment are imported as managed solutions (since go live we deployed around 30+ managed solutions – all inhouse development). As we have been told so by a CRM Partner when CRM was introduced a few years ago. In the meantime we found this is not the perfect solution for us. We are facing various issues with managed solution like:

We can’t refresh our DEV environment with a backup from the CRM live database. Since the DEV environment should not use managed solution
We have seen a lot of unexpected behavior when deploying a release as managed solution to the production environment compared to deploying it as unmanaged solution to one of our test environments. Thinks like, changes on a Form (move a field, delete it, rearrange subgrid) or Ribbons are not reflected via the Managed solution but work fine when deployed via unmanaged solution – why is this? We are on CRM 2013

So my questions:

Q1) is there a supported way to move from managed to unmanaged solution on our live environment? I have only see a few posts which speak about changing some flags on the database –which obviously is not supported.

Q2) will things change once we move to CRM2016/365 on prem (we want to do this next year)

Many thanks

Alen

Hi Alen,

Q1)There is no supported way to move managed to unmanaged solution and this is completely unsupported.The concept of managed solution is only to distribute customization in another environment and not in the same environment where it has been exported.

Usually in all project when we need to replicate the prod data in DEV we should go for data migration and this is only for dat migration not customization.

Q2) You need to follow the managed solution capabilities. No matter which version you are going to use. I agree with you that in MSCRM 2013 the solution patching was not there and might be due to reference of old managed solution you faced error at the time of deployment.

Have a look below references , Hope this will give you idea about managed solution capabilities and best practices.

msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg334576.aspx

msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg334479.aspx

msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg334353.aspx

msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg328109.aspx

msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg309329.aspx

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