Have you ever moved? I’m not talking about leaving your parents’ house for the first time, but a real move! A family of 4 move! It’s one of those events in life that can go really well… or really bad. Depending on how you prepared for this big move, it could go either way! Hopefully, I’m addressing this blog to a very organized person. Someone who thinks before they act, and someone who plans ahead before going through a big change. When Microsoft announced the launch and transitionor migration to the Dynamics 365 platform in late 2016, they had customers feeling like they were planning a move! There was excitement, but there was also anxiety. Don’t worry. Since I’ve already completed a few upgrades with reasonable ease for my clients, I was able to lay out a pattern to guide you through this upgrade.
I’ve come to realize that the best way to make the transition from Microsoft Dynamics 2016 to Dynamics 365 was to plan ahead and be organized. Essentially the preparation and organization has to happen at two different levels: the end user and the system administrator working in pair with the Microsoft partner.
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2016. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a customer relationship management software package developed by Microsoft. The product focuses mainly on sales, marketing, and service (help desk) sectors, but Microsoft has been marketing Dynamics CRM as a CRM platform and has been encouraging partners to use its once proprietary, now Open Source (.NET based) framework to.
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. Wait until the uninstall has completed. Crack in this context means the action of removing the copy protection from software or to unlock features from a demo or time-limited trial. Many downloads like Microsoft Dynamics Crm Server 2016 may also include a serial.
The latest edition of Microsoft's customer relationship management (CRM) software, Dynamics CRM 2016, is now generally available, said Jujhar Singh, the new head of Microsoft's CRM Business. Easy and Reliable Microsoft Microsoft Dynamics CRM Questions and Answers. The Microsoft Microsoft Dynamics CRM questions and answers in our study guides and dumps have been made consciously. Install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 for Outlook, also known as the Outlook client. CRM for Outlook enables access to your CRM data through Outlook.
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Preparing the End User for the Migration
Preparing the end users for the migration would be the equivalent of announcing to your family, and mostly your kids, that you’re moving. You have to think about how you’ll convey your message to them and make sure you’ll add enough positive points and excitement that they get on board with the big move right away.
Many Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 clients might have just completed their transition from Dynamics CRM 2015 to Dynamics 2016. Being faced with another major upgrade is bound to create concerns. Typical concerns include “Does the upgrade require the already existing major customizations to be recoded or reconfigured” and “Is the upgrade really required and will it take a major effort to adopt this new platform?” The good news is that most of the update process is handled by Microsoft and is likely to be uneventful.
How You Can Help Your End Users
It is a recommended best practice to notify users that the system will be unavailable during the scheduled update. Help and training videos and walkthroughs can be distributed to familiarize users with the new experience. It is recommended that you train your users as part of the upgrade process, especially with areas of the user interface that may have changed. This is also a good opportunity to provide general refresher training and update training on best practices for using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Think of it as taking a few nights to spend time with your kids looking on the internet for new attractions and activities that will be located near your new house!
Introducing Your Partner
This migration is a big step, but having help from a Microsoft partner will make the whole process a lot easier. A Microsoft partner’s role is vital in ensuring that the transition is a pre-planned activity rather than a reactive intervention. Simply put, some predefined activities need to be done, although major issues are not likely to arise during this transition. However, hiring a partner to work with the internal teams is highly recommended by Microsoft. It’s a definite benefit, because Dynamics 365 is a major opportunity.
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Putting Your System Administrator and Microsoft Partner on the Same Team
Having those two working together is the equivalent of you preparing your move. You have to organize transportation, find a new job and a new school for the kids. It’s coordinating everything behind the scenes that is really important (for the end users).
Step 1: Scheduling a migration timeline and tracking the upgrade events. It’s critical that you track all communications from Microsoft and act on them. The Microsoft partner can help in developing and rolling out the plan. Tracking success and failure notifications as Microsoft tests the CRM account and applications will ensure that you stay on course.
Step 2: Many clients who are on Office 365 with the old Dynamics CRM licenses will have to transfer Dynamics 365 licenses to their users at some point. Manually removing and assigning the new Dynamics 365 licenses for a limited group of users is fairly easy. If there are a lot of users, a Microsoft Dynamics partner can help develop and deploy scripts that will remove and reallocate the Dynamics 365 licenses for each user.
Step 3: The December 2016 Update for Dynamics 365 (online and on-premises) contains updates that you must configure manually. These include the Portal, Field Services, and Project Service products. The customer has to install the solution from the Office 365 portal andmust be opted in to receive the product updates.
Step 4: A Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner can identify any potential issues that, if not addressed, could cause the upgrade to fail. These include unsupported customizations or incompatible third-party solutions. Have the Microsoft Dynamics partner confirm that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 is compatible with your current software. An early sandbox test is needed to identify issues beforehand. Creating the correct non-production CRM sandbox instance is the key to enable testing and corrections. Early detection will ensure that corrections can be made and that the application works without glitches in the new Dynamics 365 environment. Also, some cases that need corrections will require testing the integration calls made by external applications on Dynamics 2016. Correcting them and upgrading the plugging and SDK versions used by the customizations should fix most of the bugs that may arise in the Dynamics 365 sandbox environment. The partner will create and configure the test environment to replicate your production environment. Integration with other systems, can also be replicated with test versions of those systems. The sandbox test environment can be used to perform technical and user testing prior to upgrading the production environment to Dynamics 365. Alternatively, the Exchange Server can be disabled and notifications can be tracked in the email entity.
Also note that as a good practice, you should consider removing all the email addresses for leads, customers, and users in the test environment. It should be done in such a way that any functionality being tested, such as workflow processes that may send email communications, do not send any communications generated by the testing to your leads, customers, and users. A decision needs to be made about phone numbers, as well, if you’re using any processes that send SMS messages.
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The Big Dynamics 365 Opportunity
Most of my clients have turned the upgrade to Dynamics 365 into an opportunity to create additional value and functionalities. Identifying these opportunities can instantly deliver great benefits that would have otherwise taken major time and effort. Many new features that the Dynamics 365 platform offers can increase effectiveness almost immediately. You can also audit and remove functionalities that are no longer used and explore whether a process improvement can be done at the same time.
To conclude, Dynamics 365 is a brand-new approach for delivering business solutions, powered by a common data model across applications. Mobility enablement through power apps, and a host of business intelligence utilities have also been integrated. If you plan and prepare your migration with a Microsoft Dynamics partner, your company will be able to leverage all the new features of Dynamics 365 and be more productive. I can promise you, that big move will be the best one you’ve ever made!
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Introduction
In our earlier blog we looked into the enhancements made to the way solutions can be created in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. Now moving forward we will look at a common scenario of sending out Patches for your solution. Often it happens that you may need to update a few components of your managed solution and ideally would like to have a way to only have those shipped and then have a way to compile all of these patches in the next release of the solution. This helps with better versioning control and management of the solution assets.
Patches
Taking it forward from our previous article, here is what our solution looked like.
Keep your eye on the Version number of the solution as this is one of the critical thing which will come to notice as we move ahead.
Now suppose due to some requirement changes I have to increase the maximum length for “First Name” field of Contact from 155 to 175.
Since this field was a part of the earlier solution that we had and this is the only change we need to make to that solution, we will go ahead and create a patch for the original solution
Use the “Clone a Patch” button added to the solutions views
Notice the other buttons as well “Clone Solution” and “Apply Solution Upgrade”, this completes the entire solution management architechture.
It is a good practice to increment the version number for a proper version management of the solution. Since this is a patch it only allows you to modify the last 2 digits in the version.
This creates the following new solution.
Add only the Contact “First Name” field to the solution and update the length as shown below.
Dynamics Crm 2016 Tutorial
When you import this patch on the client environment this solution will be applied on top of the base solution and only the “firstname” field will be updated.
You can create multiple patches for a solution. To create another patch you would select the original solution and click “Clone a Patch”.
The original solution can no longer be modified.
In the Target system, you can delete the managed solution of a patch without affecting the base solution installed there.
The patches don’t have a dependency on each other, so in the target system I deleted the first patch that was imported and then imported the second patch and it works just fine. So that’s huge plus, since one of the problems with earlier solution management architecture was the dependencies that would be created between managed solutions. So here there is no dependency of the patches amongst them. But of course they do need the base solution present since they are patch for the base solution.
Uninstalling the base solution on the target also automatically uninstalls all the patches that were installed for the base solution.
When you want to plan your next version of the solution, you usually want to rollup all of the patches that were released for the base solution into the new solution, before you can add new changes in there. This can be done using the “Clone Solution” button.
Microsoft Dynamics Crm 2016 Demo
Now this time, you are only allowed to change the major and minor parts of the version.
Once the operation completes, you will find the patches deleted and the base solution version updated.
This solution is now available for editing as well.
When the Upgrade solution is imported on the target system, it auto detects this to be an upgrade to an existing installed package and notifies you of the same.
On the next step of the import wizard, you get the option to choose if you want this imported as “Holding Solution”. This option will show up and checked by default if the target organization has base solution and patches for base solution installed. You can learn more about the “Holding Solution” concept here
When the solution import completes, you see a new option “Apply Solution Upgrade” since you chose to import this as a holding solution.
If you do not choose to apply the solution upgrade, you will see three solutions in the target system.
Now choose the original Base solution on the target system and click on the “Apply Solution Upgrade” button to keep a single solution for the package instead of the three that appear now
If there were no patches installed in the target system and the “Stage for Upgrade” option is unchecked, you have the option to check it if you want. If you leave it unchecked it simply updates the solution and you do not need to “Apply Solution Upgrade”.
Note : We have explained all the above scenarios using Managed Solution. When we tried with Unmanaged solution we got error “Action could not be taken for few records before of status reason transition restrictions” while importing Unmanaged Solution patch. But we were able to successfully import the cloned Unmanaged Solution for the same.
Conclusion
Though I have only explored this using basic customizations to entities, the whole solution management framework from creating a solution to patching to moving it to the next release and similarly “upgrading solution” on the target system appears that, it would reduce if not end a lot of “solution import” woes of the ISV community.
You may also like to read : User Adoption Metrics that matter in your Dynamics CRM.