Our company was acquired and we would like to move our Dynamics CE environment to another 365 Tenant/Environment.
I searched around and found this article on how Microsoft can do this for us, but wanted to know if anyone had any real world experience with this?
Is this a viable option? What issues arose from this?
The other option is to export customizations and reimport them over in the new environment, and then also do a “data migration” process and map everything, but I’ve been a part of those and feels like a lot of work.
Any thoughts or ideas on this topic is appreciated!
My company was bought out also, and we migrated to the parent company’s tenant last Sept. Our project was larger than just Dynamics, and we were moving to a tenant in Europe, so our project team used a 3rd party to handle this move for us. The move was very simple, lots of regression testing in our Sandbox environment, and a seamless move on our cutover date. We have a very small db, so the move only took a few hours. We took the system down at 5:00 on a Friday, and we were up by 8:00 pm that night. That gave us all weekend to do any integration changes that were needed and a full system regression test. There was no down time to our business users. One issue we still have is Azure storage of archived data, but that’s an internal issue. Just note you might have to move that as well. Another issue is that we changed email addresses to the parent company’s address, which meant we had to do extra work to still be able to use the original email addresses as we didn’t have time to transition our customers to the new email addresses. Here we are 6 months later and we still use the old emails. (We receive emails from our customers than D365 picks them up and creates Cases for us to work. We didn’t have time to change the code to look for emails in new shared mailboxes either.) Let me know if you have any other questions.
Hi there! It’s mostly straightforward. If you have a partner, you can have them work with Microsoft. but in reality, all that really happens is that Microsoft support does all of the hard work. You’ll need to be ready to test when they’re done their move to test and make sure things work as expected. It’s helpful if you have some test scripts or scenarios prepared for users to run through when it’s your time.
My experience has been the same as what Tina said - CRM goes offline at 5pm on a Friday, Microsoft gets to work, they’ll notify you when the system has been migrated to a new tenant, then you test and give it your blessing! Always good to tell your users it’ll be offline & N/A until Sunday 8pm… just in case
