Hello Vaibhav,
Thank you for writing to us.
The movement from CRM 2011 to Dynamics 365 will be a big one and it will be time consuming .The timelines may vary depending upon the kind of customizations ,utilization of custom code present in your organization and the amount of data that exists and sometimes it may go anywhere between 6 months to a year . however this is a very good decision and a decision for the future.
As of now there is no CRM 2013 or 2015 online that exists . All the CRM online organizations are at one Version - (Version 9) so unfortunately we would have to take the On premise route of upgrade to Dynamics 365.
So the Option for us would be to Go to CRM 2011-2013-2015-2016- Dynamics 365 and then to Version 9. There is much information available around the migration however looking at your specific ask we can take the below approach.
The below steps are a high level and may be tedious to follow considering labor and cost implications . however this is a recommended approach and I would suggest to do the same. See link
- Setup a new On premise Environment - A New CRM server and a new SQL server Instance. This can be a basic setup and you can use Trial keys for upgrade of CRM server.
- Setup a CRM server install 2013 server on It , take a DB copy of your CRM 2011 organization and import it in the CRM 2013 server. The successful import or your organization will be dependent on many factors like upgrade of your custom JS and code compatibilities of your new version . As our end goal is to Move Online it is best we write our custom code according to the updated Object model see link . This movement is also an essential point in analyzing opportunities in finding alternatives to your custom code by the Utilization of OOB features CRM provides like using Multi select option set fields or using Business rules instead of custom JS or using Virtual Entities to retrieve data from an external ODATA source in Your CRM organization.
- Then CRM 2013 to 2015 and 2015 TO 2016 and dynamics 365 will all essentially be the same steps.
You can have a look at the below link which is a documented procedure about things to take care of
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customerengagement/on-premises/deploy/plan-your-upgrade-to-microsoft-dynamics-365-server
Also for informational purposes you can glance through the below link
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314151547_Upgrading_of_on_premises_dynamics_CRM_2015
Now Movement to Online - This essentially can be thought about in two parts
- Moving your Customizations
- Moving your data
You can have a look at the link below
Dynamics 365 Tutorial: Migrate Dynamics 365 on premise to Dynamics 365 Online
Additionally with the use of Lifecycle services one can move the database to cloud see link.
Please let me know if you have any other questions around the above. Please mark my answer as verified if you found it helpful.
Bhartendu Pandey
Dynamics CRM support Engineer - Customer Engagement
Microsoft
