Speeding up the Dynamics CRM Upgrade Process

Roshan Mehta, 28 April 2011

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Upgrading your Dynamics CRM 4.0 implementation to Dynamics CRM 2011 requires a lot of planning, especially when your organization relies on heavy customizations, configurations, and extensions. It can be an overwhelming task for someone to go through the entire system and list out all of the customizations, system settings, plug-ins etc which need to be moved over to the new CRM 2011 instance. It can also delay the upgrade schedule if this process needs to be performed manually.

Here at Magnetism, we believe in making these sorts of tasks easier for our customers to save time and provide better cost estimates for the upgrade process. We have created a tool which generates an “Upgrade Architecture Report” which outlines all of the configurations which need to be considered during an upgrade. Some of these configurations include:

• All servers required to run CRM
• Operating systems
• Version of SQL Server
• Custom attributes for system entities
• Custom entities and their attributes
• Whether JScript is used on an entity form
• Users and their security roles
• System Settings
• Plug-ins
• Workflows

The tool is a simple Windows application which runs on the CRM server machine. It retrieves all of the necessary configuration data from CRM, and generates a Microsoft Word document outlining all of the important details. You can then analyse this document with other members in your organization to determine which configurations you wish to transfer over to your new CRM 2011 instance, and which configurations you wish to leave out. It also makes it easier for us as Microsoft Partners to construct an upgrade timeline plan so the upgrade process can be performed in the most cost effective and efficient way.

Please contact us if you wish to find out more about the Upgrade Architecture Report or the upgrade process from Dynamics CRM 4.0 to Dynamics CRM 2011.

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