Production Systems - Solution Managed or Unmanaged

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Posted on by CU21020959-0

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I've always thought it's best to have a Managed Solution in a production environment so it can't be modified, and has to go through the server stack to be deployed (Dev/Test/Prod etc.). This is how I've setup my several CRM customers.

Is this how everyone does it? I'm sure I read somewhere recently that Microsoft recommend Unmanaged in Production so that items can be deleted?

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Alagunellaikumar 6,212 on at

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Hi

When you have multiple server, always DEV environment has unmanaged solution. WHen you move on test environment solution export from DEV as managed solution and import it to test.

After that in the test environment you have continued your testing Once you are fine you can use the same solution import it into PROD

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BJMcmullan 720 on at

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I use unmanaged for deployments into Production as typically our solutions build upon other solutions and things change, so having the flexibility to only delete parts of a solution are beneficial. For example if you added two fields to the Account entity and three years down the road you found that one of them was no longer necessary, you'd need to keep both with a managed solution (or migrate the data to a new field and delete) with a managed solution. With unmanaged, you can just delete the one that is no longer needed.

Vendor solutions are always installed as Managed to ensure all pieces are removed when it is uninstalled.

This was what was recommended to us by both Microsoft and our Integration partner when we first set it up.

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Michel Gueli 982 on at

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I totally agree with BJMcmullan. I always use an unmanaged solution.

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Ryan Maclean 3,070 on at

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I've always struggled to get a clear answer on this. On the one hand, I can understand the benefits of having the flexibility of unmanaged solutions, however I think with this approach you can also very quickly end up with a mess in your system (e.g. unmanaged solution containers that have been modified and tweaked beyond all recognition).

I inherited a system that exclusively used unmanaged solutions in production and it took me way too long to unpick it all to understand the changes that had been made (though this was also partially due to the fact that the changes were not documented - a problem I see regularly with unmanaged solutions).

Personally, I prefer using managed solutions in my production environment, as it gives much more robust version control. If you are in a situation where you need to remove fields, etc. from a managed solution you can now do this in CRM 2016/D365 (www.inogic.com/.../how-to-delete-component-from-managed-solution-in-dynamics-crm-2016)

I don't think there is a "right" answer here, just whatever works best in your specific environment.

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TRahman 15 on at

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I agree with Ryan to pick whatever best for your environment; I normally do study the customer environment first to make this decision. Preferably, an unmanaged solution saves a lot of other hassles which a managed solution can bring along.

Internally, we were having a lot of debate on this and we concluded to keep managed solutions for independent components or the ones which are not frequently updated.

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