Best way to move changes between lanes

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Posted on by EnriqueMdz

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Hello,

As we all know, on almost every MS Dynamics CRM Project we have three environments on which we need to move our changes or new features(DEV -> TEST ->PROD). Although several ways exist to do it, I would like to know a good recomendation for this practice. In one of my past projects, we usually create a solution per sprint to add all our changes and then we import it to TEST as Unmanaged, subsequently to PROD. However, I'm not sure if this is the best approach or if there's another best way to do this.

Suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

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Aric Levin - MVP 30,190 Moderator on at

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Hi Enrique,

Do you have any issues with what you are doing right now?

Is it causing any problems?

I have worked on several different options for different organizations, and I usually do Sprint/Release updates and deploy Dev -> Test -> Stage (Not required) -> Production. Only difference is that we use managed solutions instead of unmanaged.

The main benefit in our case is that it allows us to rollback the solutions if we need to.

Hope this helps.

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gdas 50,091 Moderator on at

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Hi Enrique,

I believe both managed and unmanaged solution having advantages and disadvantages.

If your customer wants to change directly to production , or they will go for future enhancement in that case you can provide unmanaged solution in the production there is no harm as per my understanding.

Secondly for multiple solution , I am lbit disagree with you , as you are providing same data model and business requirements to the customer sof there is no reason handle multiple solution for that.In that case you can use packaging solution cloning which is introduce dynamics crm 2015. It's better to manage for agile project.in that case you should use managed solution.

Remember deletion of managed solution will be delete all the data you can clean your production or uat environment before go live fpr any purpose if you need without reinstalling your crm instance. But for unmanaged solution you canto do it .

In summary always use managed solution for your production and uat environment.

Instead of maintaining multiple solution you can do solution cloning and patching to manage your solution by Microsoft recommendations.

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

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

msdn.microsoft.com/.../mt593040.aspx

Hope this helps.

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Temmy Wahyu Raharjo 2,916 on at

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Hi, I'm giving you some idea from my experience.

My past company will separate out solution into 3 main solution:

1. Metadata

2. WebResource

3. Plugin

Other solution can be: SecurityRole, Workflow, etc.

So for development, when we have update. We will increase the version and description (using today date. Something like '2018/02/25') of the solution that only we changed. Each day we have a program that will check the description to export out automatically.

So what's the benefit using this approach? For me, when there is bug like Javascript, Plugin. We can deploy it faster because of the solution that we give to client is only contains Javascript and Plugin. Also with this approach, if something happen with your dev/test environment. You can easily create other environment with this simple solution instead of making a solution that confusing you.

Development will always be unmanaged solution. For Test and Production it must be Managed.

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EnriqueMdz 1,067 on at

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Aric, Goutam, Temmy. Thanks a lot for your time and answers. Regarding Aric's question, right now the process I'm following is working fine. However, I wanted to know better aproaches or if I was doing something wrong. Just to confirm, when moving to TEST or PROD we should always use managed solutions, right? Thanks in advance!

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ashlega 34,477 on at

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It depends - there is no Holy Grail:) With managed solutions, for example, you cannot "demote" your prod environment to an "earlier" environment - it would not make sense if all your solutions are managed.. you won't be able to export them..

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TomSmelser 1,570 on at

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Hello Enrique,

We use something similar with managed solutions. Each sprint contains updated managed solution.

Prior to deploy to prod we backup production, deploy, then test. We also keep backups of each sprint managed solution.

Good luck!

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