Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Migrating from CRM 2016 version 8.1 to Dynamics 365 version 9.0

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Posted on by Filip Vanchevski

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Hello everybody.

I have a client that just got the new cloud version of Dynamics 365.

No i have never done a migration like this before, if any of you have done this, can you point me to any useful blogs, or information in general regarding this types of migrations.

I did and am doing research on the subject but of course any help from you guys is more then welcomed.

Also my main concern here is if i will be able to export a solution from the current organization and import it in Dynamics 365?

I read on the official documentation saying "Each new version of Dynamics 365 will contain capabilities not found in earlier versions. Solutions that use new capabilities can’t be imported into an earlier version organization. Solutions exported from older version organizations can be imported into newer version organizations."

Does this refer to lets say migrating from CRM 2016 version 8.0 to 8.1 ?

Or is this also applicable to migrations from CRM 2016 v8.1 to Dynamics 365 v9.0?

Kind regards and thank you in advance

Filip.

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Hi,

this refers to also to exporting from 8.1 and importing to v9.0, i.e. it is possible to import v8.1 solution in a v9.0 environment.

The problem that you will probably encounter are some weird UI behaviour if you have hide/show function in your Business Rule and/or Javascript.

I would recommand you and your customer to order a test instance with v9.0 and try to import your solution there and do some testing before upgrading to v 9.0.

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Filip Vanchevski 215 on at

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Thanks, yeah there is plenty of java script doing hide/show on forms, these are to be expected and hopefully won't cause too much trouble.

So this means that i can export my solution as i have done so far and import it on the test organization as i have done thus far with the current version on production?

Thanks for the help :)

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Hi,

yes exactly but then be careful you can't do the other way arround, i.e. exporting from 9.0 and importing to 8.X or earlier.

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You will not be able to import an older version solution in a newer version instance. (Correction: you may, but you will not be able to make sure things work correctly).

I would upgrade the old 2016 instance to 365 to automatically get the solution files to the latest version compatibility. An alternative would be to import to an in-netween temporary 365 instance.

I would then export and import these now-upgraded solutions into the new 365 instance.

With the solution in place, the data migration could take on different shapes depending on the client requirements. For instance, is it just Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities? In that case you should be able to use a simple excel export/import.

However if there are custom entities, and if the client wants to migrate activities and more complex entities, I would use either a custom self-built tool (console application), or a third-party tool such as Kingswaysoft. There are also third-party companies providing services for these sort of data migrations.

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Filip Vanchevski 215 on at

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Thanks for your input, we are well aware that things might not work as intended when we migrate, but apart from what Guillaume said about the UI problems, can there be other problems such as:

- Will workflows included in the solution that we migrate work corectly

- Possible problems with plugins?

As far as data migration goes, yeah there are many custom entities that we will need to migrate apart from the OOB entities such as Account, Contact, Lead etc. The data base isn't that big so i was thinking that the Import Wizard might do the trick without the need to create a custom console app, or use third party tools...

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Aric Levin - MVP 30,190 Moderator on at

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Hi Filip,

Although this might be an almost out of the migration, there are a few things that you have to keep in mind.

- Data Migration: You will need to find a way to map existing On-Prem users to Online Users as the Guid of the records will not match. This means that when you are importing User record data (any lookup to the user entity), you will have to have some logic to modify the Guid to the correct Guid of your online environment.

- Scripting: Although Client Scripting that was developed for v8.1 should work in v9.0, I would recommend this as a good time to convert the scripts to the new Client Api, as it is possible that future releases will not support the existing Client Api.

- The solution file should import, but you will need to get this thoroughly tested.

I think the other answers covered some of the other aspects.

Hope this helps.

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Hi Filip,

you wil not do an onprem to cloud migration? Or did I misunderstand you?

I hope not because for onprem to cloud, you will have a lor more work to do (Data migration)

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Hi Filip,

We are attempting to do 8.1 to online migration, I was wondering if you have any updates or suggestions for us?

Thanks,

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Filip Vanchevski 215 on at

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Hi colored, and sorry for the late response.

I would like to point out some of the biggest setbacks that we encountered during our migration as well as some useful tools to make the migration easier.

1. Use XrmToolbox - here there are two plugins that will help you out Data Transporter and Manage N:N Relationships

- Data transporter allows you to migrate records and has a nice and straightforward design

- Manage N:N Relationships will help you migrate these types of relationships once you have your records migrated.

2. As far as migrating solutions go you can migrate from an older version such as 8.1 to 9.0 with almost no problems, but you will need to test java scripts to see if everything works as it should. You don't need to do any magic tricks, simply export the solution with all your entities, web resources, processes and anything else that you want to migrate.

3. When migrating records, we encountered problems with the Product Entity, as it was using the Default Unit Group and Primary Unit. Now what we found out is that when you create and set up the new organisation the GUID's will be different and you will not be able to migrate the products, in this case we migrated the products to our server where we set the GUIDS's of the Default Unit Group and Primary Unit directly using SQL, once we set the GUID's to match those of the new org we had no problems.

Again sorry for the late response, i hope you already managed to migrate but for future reference i hope this helps.

All the best.

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