Migrate Dynamics CRM On-Premises to Dynamics CRM Online

Dynamics CRM Online is gaining popularity these days with the cloud first approach of Microsoft to have all updates come out for CRM Online before they are out for CRM On-Premises. CRM 2015 SP1 was only released for CRM Online and CRM On-Premises customers had to wait until CRM 2016 to get the cumulative updates since CRM 2015.

Microsoft has also been busy adding new data centers around the world to serve the increasing demand for CRM Online and improve performance by bringing the data centers close to the customers. Most recently, Microsoft added Data Centers to India, Australia, and Japan. Learn more about CRM Online Data Centers here.

With this policy change at Microsoft, CRM customers are increasingly adopting the cloud and moving from their current CRM On-Premises system to the cloud. And in the recent past, we have been assisting a lot of our customers in this transition.

What does it take to make the move?

1. User Licenses: Understanding of the features that your users use/need. This will help in deciding the licenses that need to be purchased. The different licenses available for CRM Online can be found here. The pricing and licensing guide for CRM Online can be downloaded from here. 
2. Email Integration: Are you using Exchange Online and integrate it with CRM Online? If not are Exchange or email server On-Premises? You can either integrate the email using Server-side Sync or Email Router or continue to use Outlook client for mail sync. 
3. Attachments: Do you store a lot of files in CRM notes or email attachments? When on On-Premises, you need to just ensure you have enough space on your SQL server to expand to accommodate all of the attachments. However, when you are moving Online, space is a valuable resource and is priced at a steeper end. You may want to consider options like SharePoint integration to store all of your attachments on SharePoint where the space is available at almost a fraction of the cost of CRM Online space. 
4. Customizations: You need to check the current CRM version that you are on and the versions you have skipped since then to the current. If you are still on Microsoft CRM 3.0 or CRM 4.0, we usually recommend considering the transition as a fresh start to redesign the CRM processes based on the feature set available in CRM Online at the moment. You would be surprised to note that most of the customizations from back then may not be needed moving forward and there would be a better and most likely a native way of handling it without the need of any customizations. Customizations can only be imported from a previous version of CRM to next version. Starting CRM 2016 you are actually able to export customization's out of Dynamics CRM 2013 and import that into CRM 2016. However if you are on CRM 2011, you would need to upgrade your customizations to be compatible with CRM 2013 so that an export from there can then be imported into CRM 2016. 
5. Data Migration: Microsoft currently does not support restoring of a CRM On-Premise SQL backup of the data to CRM Online so that the data is automatically migrated to the new instance on CRM Online. You are currently required to manage the data migration from Dynamics CRM On-Premises to CRM Online on your own. 

Tools for handling data migration from CRM On-Premises to CRM Online

1. There are various 3rd party data migration tools in the market that would help you get the data online. Scribe and SSIS Toolkit by KingswaySoft is a couple of the popular data migration tools that we have used in the past.
2. Data Loader Service from Microsoft – This is still in Preview I believe and is only available to CRM Online in North America.
3. Native Import data option within Dynamics CRM – You can provide data in csv file format and import it. From experience, this is not the most efficient way to get the data imported especially if you are importing huge data set.
4. Finally, if you are developer, you can go ahead and build your own data import tool using CRM SDK.

Some of the points to take care of during data migration

1. You need to map users between CRM On-Premises and CRM Online correctly. You might have data owned by legacy users that are no longer active in CRM On-Premises and will not be created in CRM Online. To handle these scenarios you need to discuss with the customer to provide for a default user that should own all such records/activities. 
2. The social pane on entity forms display list of activities associated with the record, it sorts the list on modifiedon. During migration the platform allows us to set the createdon to the original createdon for the activity but not the modifiedon, this means that the list here will be displayed in the order in which the activities are being processed during import.                           Earlier we used to migrate activities by the type i.e. All Phone Calls, then All tasks etc.… this caused the issue with the social pane only listing the last entity type records in the social pane.                                                              Make sure to process your activities from the Activity Pointer rather than the individual activity type entities. 
3. Unit Group and Primary Unit. You can have Unit with the same name in more than one Unit Group. When you do a lookup to search the Unit to be set to Primary Unit, make sure you also compare by the Unit Group. A mismatch in the Unit Group and Unit will cause issues with Product Import. 
4. When a Case is resolved or Opportunity Won, an activity record is created behind the scenes. Data migration using some of the tools available in the market does not create these background activities. This may cause issues with fields like actualclosedate incorrectly set.