Managing Solutions with a Sandbox copy of a Production Dynamics 365 instance

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My environment is currently running a Dynamics 365 Online CRM production and Sandbox instance.

We have developed many customizations (custom entities, entity fields, option sets, plugins, workflows, actions, web resources, javascript, ribbons, etc..) which are defined in an unmanaged solution in the Sandbox instance.

Our process is to test our customizations in Sandbox and when we're satisfied in stability we export the customizations defined in the Sandbox solution and import it into Production as a managed solution.

It's been almost a year and now there's a pretty big difference in the data in the Sandbox and Production instances.

With the goal of have a testing environment with a copy of our live data and as backup we were planning on overwriting the Sandbox instance with a copy of the Production instance.

Once that happens the concern becomes how do manage the solution in the new Sandbox which is now managed, since it's a copy from production. We can create a new solution for new customizations, but my concern becomes what happens if lets say I want to remove a webresource defined in the managed solution as it's no longer needed? Is that possible? What's the recommended approach to these type of scenarios?

Thanks for any insight anyone can provide.

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Chris H @ ISC 2 on at

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If all your work is internal to your organization, and you are NOT planning to distribute the solution to the outside, my recommendation would be to keep it unmanaged in both the sandbox and production.

There is no advantage to making it managed in production, other than to have the option to un-install it at some point in the future.

Just keep it unmanaged.

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Community Member on at

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Unfortunately that's no longer an option as production already has the managed version of the solution deployed and I found no safe way to convert a managed solution to unmanaged for an online CRM instance. This was setup for us initially by a consultancy firm specializing in CRM. I can only guess at their reasoning for this structure.

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Community Member on at

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This is a tricky question to answer, I guess there are some past discussions talk about converting the unmanaged to managed solution, but that is not a safe way/right way as it is too risky!

I think you are still safe, IF:

The components in managed solution are not flag as "NON-CUSTOMIZABLE". Check if you can still edit the components in Default Solution. (But keeping managed solution in Sandbox is not really a good idea, you might scream and yell later on...)

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ashlega 34,477 on at

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Have to agree with Melvin (even if I am usually trying not to).. You do need to have it as unmanaged in the sandbox or you will scream and yell later on..

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ashlega 34,477 on at

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And to add to that.. You seem to have only two options:

- Overwrite sandbox from production

- Forget about overwriting sandbox and develop an SSIS/Scribe package to simply copy the data over

Out of those two, personally I would choose the second one even if it's more time-consuming.

Even if the components are customizable, you'll be creating a potentially dead-end problem by making this solution managed in Sandbox. For example, if you have an entity there.. and if you ever decide to engage third-party developer to customize that entity.. that developer will have to work directly in your sandbox - you won't be able to export that entity to a solution file since you'll only be able to export whatever customizations you'll make on top of the managed solution (the "delta")

One other way to resolve this situation would be to copy data to Sandbox (not the database, just the data.. still SSIS etc), then to promote sandbox to production..

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Community Member on at

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Thanks for the suggestions, we came to the same conclusion from the responses here.

We're currently going to try to copy the data over via the Data Export service/SSIS? Or will Scribe be needed for an import?

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ashlega 34,477 on at

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I'm pretty sure SSIS can do this (you'll need a connector from KingswaySoft / CozyRock.. but they are free as long as you don't start scheduling those jobs directly on the SSIS server)

Scribe can do it as well

Data Export service - I'm not sure it can push production data directly to Sandbox..

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