Dynamic 365 CRM Migration Tips and Consideration

We all want to get to latest version of Dynamic CRM as we are interested in getting new features attached to it.

Here in this blog I would try to list down following

• Considering various Migration activities
• Considering some important factors when doing migration
• Understanding the reason for your migration – list down features that are not achievable in existing CRM

I have list down few of my thoughts, which I can think of when doing Dynamic CRM migration 

I have encounter specific issue related to Product Migration, you can look at same here.

"The unit id is missing" for Product in Dynamic CRM

Tools to consider for Data Migration

CRM Configuration Migration is the one tool I found very easy going for limited data migration.

Refer below blog for few effective tips for data migration

https://vjcity.blogspot.com/2019/02/effectively-using-crm.html

Pre-Configuration in Dynamic CRM

Business Units & Security Roles

Do we need to configure CRM with business hierarchy and have security around various users operating within dynamic CRM?

Does our business function across the globe?

The answer to such question will involve us in configuring business units and security role.

Users Configuration

A user must be configured in advance before we initiate the actual data migration within Dynamic CRM, so that the records can be associated with their specific owner.

What about the users who might have left the organization and which specific user must be used to replace when doing migration.

There are two types of records in dynamic CRM

Organization Owned: Like Products, Price-list, Competitors, Currency, etc.

User Owned: Like Contacts, Accounts, Sales Order, Invoice, etc. The records that are owned by a user or team, they’re connected to a business unit and specific security roles for the business unit. Therefore, these entities participate in role-based security.

Know the size of the database

• How many customers we are migrating? (This typically decide the duration of migration activity as most of the entities are directly or indirectly related to customer base)
• What all other entities linked to Contacts especially if there are some parent entity to contact like Account, Leads, or Organization? Can we list those?

Is Data Cleaning Required?

During the data migration phase, we get an opportunity to analyses if we can get rid of garbage data by not taking it forward to another fresh CRM. We can query the system to verify for what data needs to be migrated. Some of the example to query garbage data are:

• Contact records that are not having any unique identification like email ID, phone number, social security number, etc.
• Records that had created during the testing via some service accounts.
• How many nulls or empty strings are there for some entities?
• Are we having duplicate records with same unique identification?

Consider Time & Cost factor

It is the most crucial factor in deciding a migration process.

• There are certain tools, which do the migration at their best, but they come with their added cost but save a lot of time. (Example – Scribe)
• For large-scale data that need to be migrated an SSIS packages can be a good option where we can also define our own business conditions for data migration. This option require time and development efforts.
• Dynamic CRM does come with default data migration tools as well, provided it require data to be formatted accordingly

Managing Workflow and other Triggering operation

Often we have business automation implemented in our CRM. For example to send, welcome email to a customer when a contact record is created in system or assign the lead to specific user or team. We need to be very cautious when doing data migration as they might trigger the business automation processes that we might not actually be interested.

Usually workflows are supposed to be in Draft or OFF state during the migration process and once all the data is migrated, they can be turned in ACTIVE or ON state.

Some of the processes that are specific to Dynamic CRM are:

• Deactivate the workflow processes
• Disable the Plugin Steps
• Disable the custom workflow
• Disable Database Indexes – For CRM On-Premise
• Turn off tracing/logging for better performance.

Doing Trail and reducing the overall migration Risk

A recommended approach is to do a trail migration of subset of data and then after verifying the subset data migrated go for an actual migration.

Once we start data migration activity in Production environment, start-involving users to verify the data being migrated. Users know their data very well, they can identify any invalid entry, and we can reconsider our migration approach.

Run the Reports

Comparing report results provide the best way to verify if certain entities and their respective data is been properly migrated or not. 

Note : When you might be doing migration from CRM 2011 then if reports are build using SQL statement then it has to be converted to Fetch XML based when migrating to Dynamic 365 CRM.

An example quarterly, monthly sales analysis report.