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725Hi all,
We are currently running Dynamis365 V9 on premise and are assessing a migration to Online. MS told us to sign up for an Online trial – and move our customization to an Online instance so we can perform some testing. The issue I’m describing is not specific when the target is an Online instance it also applies to a vanilla on premise CRM organization.
First I tried to export the default solution (all our customization) from our on premise DEV system to the Online trial. I’m getting many dependency issues (mostly regarding managed solutions). I found this article from MS stating that you can’t export the default solution from on-premise and import online (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dynamicscrm-2016/administering-dynamics-365/dn531198(v=crm.8)?redirectedfrom=MSDN)
So I thought let’s only move a subset of our customizations to Online. I’ve created a new solution on our DEV system and added the Account entity. The Account entity has many related Entities (which are added automatically to the solution) – so it would be a good showcase for the PoC we want to run on the Online instance. Unfortunately again when importing this unmanaged solution Online we are facing a lot of import errors. Mainly about missing managed solution on the target environment.
To give you a bit more background:
- When we started to work with CRM2013 in 2014 we were advised by a MS partner to import all our in-house customizations as managed solutions into our Production environment. Totally we deployed around 30-35 managed solutions + there are couple of external managed solutions (3rd party solutions like ClickDimension, Attachment Extractor)
- In 2019 when we migrated from CRM2013 to D365 on premise we decided to stop deploying managed solution to Production and only import unmanaged solution (managed solution gave us some issues with the deployment sometimes where we had to manually fix the customization through the unmanaged layer).
- Once the upgrade project finished our new D365 DEV system has been rebuilt by a clone from Production (database import). So we ended up with those 30-35 managed solutions in our dev system. That hasn’t been causing any issues so far as we can still change all components on DEV through the unmanaged layer and deploy as unmanaged solution to UAT/Production.
But now when importing our customization to a new/empty/vanilla Organization we running into various dependency issues. Because CRM expects the managed solution to be available in the Target Organization. We don’t have access anymore to all of the managed solutions, even if we had with some of the deployments of these managed solutions there was a lot of manual work involved (deleting components like fields from Forms etc). So we can’t re-do all of this work again. This could keep us busy for a couple of months just to put as into a situation where can deploy our customization to the Online trial (or an on Premise vanilla org) and start testing.
- can you give some technical advise on our approach?
- Maybe we are missing something. Is there a supported/unsupported way to bypass the issue we are facing?
- Can we get rid of the managed solutions on our Dev system but keep all the customization in the unmanaged layer?
- How would this issue be handled by the Fast Track / Lift & shift option from MS ?
- Would the solutions be migrated like-like from OnPremise to Online? Ideally we want to get rid of all inhouse managed solution and only work with the unmanaged solution + the external managed solutions we would still need once Online.
- I found this article describing an unsupported method using sql statement to change the IsManaged flag and Solution for each solution component. Not sure if this could work for us – at least for the PoC.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Thanks
Alen
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