What is the best way to implement changes in CRM?

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Posted on by CRM Learner 88

I'm going to be working on a new implementation of CRM and I want to establish some basic change mangement control.

Can simple changes ever just be made in production or is it best to export a solution from UAT or QA environment into production? Should it be done as unmanaged or managed?

What are the risks of just making changes in Prod without doing the solution import/export

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anilambadan 1,160 on at

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Hi

Please try to set up atleast 3 environments like

1. Development

2. Test

3. Production

Always make changes in Development environment and deploy it as unmanaged/managed (depends) solutions.

Please see the following link about best practices

crmbusiness.wordpress.com/.../crm-2013-overview-of-solutions

thanks

Anil

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Mahendar Pal 45,095 on at

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Hi,

You should not do any customization directly to Production system, you should always do your changes in dev first and need to transfer to production.

For your internal deployment dev ->QA to production you should use unmanaged solution.

But if you are ISV and have to release solution after QA testing to client, then you should release Managed solution to your customer.

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Henrique Silvestre 6 on at

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Hi,

It's a really good practise export your solutions from your development environement to QA and after to production environement.

Also, I recommend that you keep one solution for each feature, this will help you organize, maintain and use some control version system.

Managed solutions are installed on top of the system solution and can modify any customizable solution components or add more solution components.

Unmanaged solutions are groups of unmanaged customizations. Any unmanaged customized solution component can be associated with any number of unmanaged solutions.

So, if you dont want to that your users made changes or export your solution choose managed solutions, otherwise choose unmanaged.

The risks is long term risk or after a bunch of changes you will made in the production environment will become to dificult to track changes and much more dificult to undo the changes.

I Hope this help,

Kind Regards,

Henrique Silvestre

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ScottDurow 21 on at

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Don't use a managed solution unless you are an ISV! Ironically, managed solutions are very difficult to manage and can result in you not being able to roll out updates if there any changes made to the unmanaged layer for whatever reason.

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CRM Learner 88 on at

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Thanks to all for the replies. It looks like the consensus is to have 3 environments

Dev

Test (or UAT)

Production

So to use an example here... We would do the changes in Dev then export the solution and import it into the Test environment. If all was ok we would import to production. But if we needed to go back and make any changes, we would do it in Dev and use that same solution to import from Dev to Production, correct?

Also it is advised to use an unmanaged solution for each change or feature. This is very good advice in that we can have version control so thanks for the tip here!

My general understanding of unmanaged versus mangaged was that Managed solutions could not be modified while unmanaged solutions could be.

I'm trying to get clarity on Henrique's statement of:

"Managed solutions are installed on top of the system solution and can modify any customizable solution components or add more solution components.

Unmanaged solutions are groups of unmanaged customizations. Any unmanaged customized solution component can be associated with any number of unmanaged solutions."

Maybe someone can give me a simple of example of this? I think it would make my understanding more clear. Thanks all!

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ScottDurow 21 on at

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Really the main difference is that once you import a managed solution you are introducing an extra layer of complexity that you don't need unless you want to allow updates to your solution without affecting changes made on top of it. So if you sold a product that clients install you need to send out updates without overwriting the clients own customizations.

Hope that helps.

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CRM Learner 88 on at

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Thanks Scott. I guess I'm just trying to relate this into an example so it makes sense.

So for example we have a default solution in CRM. If I import a managed solution it could potentially complicate elements within the default solution?

With your example of selling a product that clients would install that would need updates without overwriting the client's own customizations; Wouldn't unmanaged make sense if it wouldn't be able to overwrite the "managed" default solution?

I found this article which is helpful: http://www.felinesoft.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/what-are-the-differences-between-managed-and-unmanaged-solutions-in-crm-2011/

But I don't understand that managed solutions can be uninstalled while unmanaged solutions cannot?

I guess that confuses me because I thought "managed" solutions would be the choice for companies selling solutions. Sorry for my confusion :( Please feel free to treat me like a 5 year old when explaining.

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CRM Learner 88 on at

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Thanks for all the replies here. I think the consensus is to use solutions for making changes. However for small things like updating security roles.... is it better to just manually update this in all 3 environments? Any other updates that could be done outside of exporting/importing solutions?

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Mahendar Pal 45,095 on at

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Instead of doing it in all three environment separately you can have a small solution where you can add your customized security role and can take them to your QA and prod environment.

You can update plugins with the help of plugin registration tools if any, which can directly connect to your environment and do update/or new registration.

Thanks

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