Let’s plan your move to Dynamics CRM 2011, it’s time

We’ll start by saying that yes, it’s probably time. With that said, I will concede that it might not be the perfect solution for everyone (quite frankly it’s more likely you just don’t know that it’s perfect for you yet). With a software solution as all-encompassing as your CRM moving to a new product or environment is not something to do without planning it out. I’m in the process of moving my own internal company CRM to CRM 2011 and this is the general set of guidelines and decisions going through my head as I do this. I know there is probably a longer list of considerations, I welcome your additions. We will start with the basic assumption that you WILL be moving forward to CRM 2011. For my company move we are working from our On-Premise to the cloud with CRM Online.

Timeframe- The first big (BIG) choice to make is when to upgrade. It’s easy to think you should jump right in and go for it, and that is entirely possibly the best choice for you. But you owe it to yourself and your users, clients and data to do it right, so think it through a little first. Things to consider…. Do you have server resources ready? A staging environment? Are your users ready and trained? Are you trained in what you are trying to do? Do you have someone to call on if you get stuck?

Data- Do you really need it all? Like me, you probably throw everything plus the kitchen sink into CRM just in case. Now is a good time to think if you really need it moving forward? If it’s ugly unneeded in v4.0 rolling it to CRM 2011 won’t suddenly make it valuable. Find and ditch the orphan records.

To the Cloud- I’ve said it before with v4.0 that most CRM implementations can happily and efficiently run in CRM Online. That statement is now even truer than before with CRM 2011. You’ve got the cool bells and whistles in your online environment now so why not let Microsoft data centers manage your uptime? Toggle your performance load so you don’t see those hits with the intensive processes you might use? It is a safe, affordable and reliable option for you, you owe it to yourself to investigate it.

Should it roll forward - Looking through our CRM I am seeing things now that could be done so much better in CRM 2011 than we did it in v4.0. For example we made a little module for project management, specifically to use Scrum to manage our software development projects. It works just fine, not a thing wrong with it. It’s done using supported customizations. Sounds on the surface like we should convert it to CRM 2011, right? My gut is telling me no, let’s rebuild it and do it better. Let’s use the built in goals for example, web resources, sub-grids, etc. So this project management module will be moved to CRM 2011, but not on our first round, we will build an independent solution to add on when we do it in a month or two.

Convert vs re-write- We use our internal CRM to process book orders for our book websites. We’ve got most of the work happening in three custom entities that talk with the system ones. I’m just going to make those custom entities by hand in my new environment. We’ve got clients with gazillions of customizations, their story is different. Mine is fairly simple, no need to over-complicate it. If you’re not sure and not technical, I have some advice for how you might gage this need. Do an export of your customizations and open the xml, it looks like code, but don’t let it scare you. Do a Control-F (Crtl key plus F key at the same time). This will open a search function in your browser, in the search box type your custom prefix (ours is CTC, so all our customizations start like ctc_customnamehere). If you never set your prefix, it will be the default prefix, new. So search for new and look for new_customnamehere. Tab through this and see how many customizations have been done. You will soon get a feel that each result is not an independent customization, so glance through them. You can then get an idea of how many customizations you have and then decide if the time commitment to re-do ad hoc is what you want or you want to roll the whole she-bang.

Supported or not- This seems to be one of the most controversial topics in CRM customizations, are your changes supported? What does this mean? When Microsoft publishes a product and any subsequent updates, they have a testing and implementation process, like anyone else. This allows for some control over the quality of what is out to the public. As part of this, some of the customizations that we might be CAPABLE of doing, might not be a good idea. Each customizer must decide the pros/cons of the change when it’s unsupported. The two biggest downfalls of doing an unsupported change, a push change from Microsoft might cancel out your change or your change just might not work. So if you decide to do some unsupported changes the best advice I have is to document document document. Then when the changes roll out, go check your list and establish a process for how to review and confirm these unsupported changes and their behavior moving forward. Moving your org from v4.0 to CRM 2011 does not change this process. Go review your list, read the documentation, blogs, forums, and see what you could expect with those unsupported changes in CRM 2011. Remember, just because you CAN might not mean you SHOULD, and if you still do, write it down somewhere (heck, make a custom entity to manage this in CRM itself).

The extras- If you are doing your upgrade in pieces, like I suspect many will, don’t forget some important things that are not really customizations and not really data, but could be just as important to your use of CRM; workflows and custom reports. This is another area where I think you should get rid of the stuff you’re not using and take a look to see if you can make it any better with new functionality. Sometimes you should just move it right forward, sometimes you might want to re-write it.

Where to get help- The SDK is full of useful cool things and hands-on labs to walk you through many scenarios that will make sure you’re ready for CRM 2011 in general. When you need specific help look around the Resource Center module in CRM itself. Also go to the product support forums, the team blogs, user groups and CRM MVPs like myself.

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