Development, Testing and Production Environments for CRM Implementation

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Posted on by Ali Khan

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I am from a Salesforce background and currently learning Dynamics 2013 Online, so please bear my naivety.

In Salesforce, there is an option to have sandboxes for development, configuration and testing environments before moving whole solution (configuration, customizations) to Production environment at the time of project go-live (for details: please see www.salesforce.com/.../sandbox.jsp). I am wondering how to do this in Dynamics 2013 Online. On googling, I have found one option is to implement everything on-premise and then move this to Cloud at the time of Production. But is there a better way?

Appreciate your help. Thanks.

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lokeswari 5 on at

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RE: Development, Testing and Production Environments for CRM Implementation

Hi Mike -

We are a Microsoft Partner with a production instance of CRM online for internal use. I signed up for a demo instance and received a welcome message. However, there was no URL for the new instance in the message, and whenever I login through the portal, I am directed to our production instance.

When I go to the admin interface, it shows we have two instances, but it does not provide any information on the URLs.

How can I login to the demo instance?

I originally posted this question in another MS forum over a month ago, and still don't have an answer.

social.microsoft.com/.../url-for-partner-demo-instance

Thanks,

david
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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Development, Testing and Production Environments for CRM Implementation

Hi AK,

In my opinion this is the better way. So doing you can develop all your solution and plugin in a independent environment. You can install VS and connect it with your organization CRM. In this way you can install in the test environment all software and db that you need to develop the solutions, plug-in, connectors, etc.

Once the solution is finished you can export as managed and install it in the production environment.
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Michael Hammons on at

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RE: Development, Testing and Production Environments for CRM Implementation

Hi AK,

Yes, this is possible with Dynamics CRM 2013 Online. If you have a minimum of 25 Professional User Licenses, one non-production instance is included with your subscription. If you do not have 25 Professional users licenses or want to add additional instances, you can purchase one or more Non-Production Instance Add-On licenses for $150 per month.

Additional Production instances can be purchased for $549/month.

The user licenses will work for any of your instances (no need to buy more user licenses for your additional instances).

To add additional licenses, submit a ticket through your portal admin or contact your business partner.

Here is a customer document that has a little more detail on the licensing.

go.microsoft.com/.../p

To move your changes from one instance to another you will need to create a Solution that packages your changes into a zip file which can be applied to the other instances.

Currently, there is no built-in option for moving data from one instance to another. To move data, you will need to either export/import data or go with an option like Scribe Online to quickly and easily move data from one instance to another.

www.scribesoft.com/Online

Mike