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Well it’s official, C5 Insight has officially migrated our data from CRM 4 On-Premise to CRM 2011 ONLINE!! I am sure a lot of you are asking well how did you do this? As you may or may not know Microsoft has not released any upgrade path for current or any new Dynamics CRM customers to move their data to cloud hosted.
When we first started thinking about doing this we wanted to be on the forefront of this new release and go “Online” as quick as possible. However we also wondered how we would get our data migrated since Microsoft did not have any published avenue for us to follow. As a Scribe MVP, Scribe Insight (www.ScribeSoft.com) was the product of choice to get this migration successfully completed. With that said we did have to overcome a few obstacles throughout the way which I will mention later on, but overall we had great success.
Why move to Dynamics CRM 2011 now?
With Dynamics 2011 being cloud hosted this now allows for us to have the same code-base as being on-premise which is great news because with Dynamics CRM 4 this was not the case. We are very excited about this and can’t wait to get all our users live with it next week.
First Steps
The first thing we started thinking about was how to get our customizations upgraded so that we could move them to the cloud. Matt Wittemann, a colleague of mine who wrote the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Bible, took on this task. He previously wrote a blog on different Upgrade Paths for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 which you can review to determine what might be the best path for your organization. We chose to upgrade via the import process and then transfer the customizations to CRM Online using solutions.
Now that we had our customizations fully deployed to CRM 2011 Online, we then focused our efforts on the migration. The overall migration design / implementation process took about a week and half to design and test all the different components. It did take a good amount of knowledge on how the Dynamics CRM database was structured along with different gotchas that could cause a failure along the way.
Challenges
As far as challenges go, we did have a few thorny issues that we were able to overcome or work around.
Overall I think we had a great success with our migration and can’t wait for all our clients to move to CRM 2011. In my next blog I will talk about a new product being released from Scribe Software which is called “Scribe Online” - this is a service that allows you to replicate your Dynamics CRM 2011 database locally. Stayed tuned and I hope you enjoy CRM 2011!
**Scribe is currently developing the Dynamics CRM 2011 adapter but they have emphasized that the current CRM 4.0 adapter does successfully connect and use most of the same calls as CRM 2011.
Hi, I'm migrating from Dynamics CRM 4.0 to Dynamics CRM 2011 online. I have two issues here and was wonering if Scribe can sort them out:Can Scribe migrate Activity parties for e-mails with more than one recipient?Can Scribe migrate attachments on Contact etc.?
Hi Oskar,Yes, Scribe can migrate emails with multiple recipients. You will need to utilize the ActivityParty object in the Scribe Adapter. Regards,Bill Kaik
Hi Bill, I am very new to CRM and had a somewhat small migration (so i thought) from a partner hosted CRM 4 site to CRM online. I ran into the issue that you came across for unresolved recipients in an email activity. You mentioned that one would need to review the "(SDK) documentation and look for an entity ID that will allow for those unresolved contacts to be referenced against". I am confused as to what that means. Can you advise?
I am performing a similar migration right now using Scribe. I'd like to know how you overcame the unresolved contact issue, as well as how you brought annotation attachments into the target system. Regardless of how I map attachments, the annotation record brought into CRM has no attachments.Thanks,-Tom
Hi Tom,In regards to the unresolved contacts you will want to review the API (SDK) documentation and look for an entity ID that will allow for those unresolved contacts to be referenced against. As far as attachments go you will want to make sure you are mapping, "vfAttachmentBase64" and "vfAttachmentFileName" and don't use the other attachment fields. The other thing to be aware of is when migrating entities with a BLOB you will want to make sure that is the last column in your sql query otherwise it will get truncated.I hope that helps you out. Regards,Bill Kaik
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