Moving solutions from UCI to Legacy Web Client environment?

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Posted on by glouser

Hello, so we are moving our d365 environments from legacy web client to UCI gradually. We have currently 3 operational environments: PROD, TEST, and DEV. Our uci transition plan is to turn UCI on in DEV, then in TEST, and then eventually PROD.

As first step, we are thinking of refreshing DEV from PROD, so that DEV is synchronized with prod, and then making dev run in UCI mode only.

Then we are planning to proceed to doing normal development in uci-fied DEV, leaving TEST and PROD in legacy web client mode.

My question is can we promote dynamics solutions from UCI (Dev) to LEGACY WEB CLIENT environment (TEST) safely without running into compatibility issues?

Thanks

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Henry J. 5,237 on at

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Hello,

I would be very careful refreshing your DEV environment with your PROD environment.

If Application Lifecyle Management best practices have been followed, the customizations you did in your unmanaged solutions in your development environment should have been deployed as managed to your production environment. So copying your production environment to your development environment could prevent you from being able to export customisations (as managed solutions cannot be exported) and potentially result in making you lose access to your unmanaged customisations "source".

Consider copying your production environment to your development environment ONLY if solutions were deployed to production as unmanaged (which is against Microsoft best practice but nothing prevents this).

Now to your question, enabling Unified Interface is really just about how you render your applications. This doesn't impact any of your customizations (forms, views) or custom developments (scripts, plugins, etc.)
So enabling Unified Interface in your development environment and deploying customizations to your test environment shouldn't introduce any compatibility issue (unless if those issues are introduced by your customizations, but this is unlikely if they are not unsupported customizations).

Consider getting help from chapter 3 of the Unified Interface Playbooks to approach this transition project:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/model-driven-apps/unified-interface-playbook

Henry
glouser 55 on at

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1. Our custom developed solutions get deployed to PROD from TEST as unmanaged solutions currently though we do have some managed solutions in prod currently from Microsoft and ISVs (ex. Dynamics 365 workflow tools from github.com/.../Dynamics-365-Workflow-Tools) . So I'm thinking we can refresh our dev from prod. Let me know if there is anything else I need to evaluate on this front before going ahead and refreshing dev from prod.

2. It sounds like we can have DEV in UCI mode only and still promote our solutions to TEST which is in legacy web client mode.

I will go thru the URL you alluded to. Right now our plan is next month we will turn TEST environment to UCI mode only and finally PROD.

Thanks
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Henry J. 5,237 on at

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If only ISV or Microsoft solutions are managed, it sounds like you could refresh your DEV with your PROD.
I would still advise to make a backup of DEV (sandbox backups are retained for 7 days) and make some deployment tests to make sure you don't lose anything or lock yourself out of your development environment, where unmanaged customisations should reside (as well as in your source control).

To your second point, yes, you can have DEV in UCI mode and promote your solutions to TEST, even if that environment isn't enabled for the "Unified Interface Only" mode.

What we recommend is to create Unified Interface model-driven apps, these can be deployed to your environments regardless if the "Unified Interface Only" mode has been turned on or not. They will always display in Unified Interface.

Henry
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Brandon Sambat Microsoft Employee on at

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My question is can we promote dynamics solutions from UCI (Dev) to LEGACY WEB CLIENT environment (TEST) safely without running into compatibility issues? - Yes, you should be able to promote the solutions into Test. Even though you have Legacy Web client the Test instance will still have the ability for UCI. It is possibly that you may run into compatibility issues going between UCI and Legacy Web Client. powerapps.microsoft.com/.../