Considerations when

Moving to the Cloud

2017 CRM Conference

Shawn GensSenior Solution Architect & Managing Consultant

sgens@ledgeviewpartners.com

Ellie GhanbariCRM Developer

eghanbari@ledgeviewpartners.com

A Few Questions…

• How many of you are currently using an On-Premise version of Dynamics CRM?

• How many of you are currently using another non-Microsoft On-Premise CRM product?

Some Statistics

• Gartner estimates 75 percent of total IT budgets are used to just maintain and run existing systems and infrastructure.

• According to Forbes:• U.S.-based organizations are budgeting $1.77M

for cloud spending in 2017 compared to $1.30M for non-U.S. based organizations.

• 70% of all organizations having at least one app in the cloud today.

Some Statistics

• The worldwide cloud computing market grew 21% to $110 billion in 2015 according to Synergy Research Group

• 17% of enterprises run over 1,000 VMs (virtual machines) in the public cloud, compared to 13% in 2015, according to RightScale's State of the Cloud survey.

Why Move to the Cloud?

• Low Overhead• Electricity, hardware and software costs• Need staff or consultants to maintain

• Updates• Security is important• Enhancements• Scheduled downtime

• Access• How does your staff get to CRM?• Do you need Mobile?

• Support• Expertise in many applications

• AD and ADFS, SQL Server IIS, and CRM• Who do you call when there is a problem?

Considerations Before you Begin

• Things to think about during your initial evaluation:• Licensing differences

• Per user per month vs. CALs• Microsoft is encouraging companies to move to the cloud with

recent licensing changes

• Do you already have Office 365?• If yes, make sure you add Dynamics to your existing tenant• Are you using other cloud services from Microsoft

• Azure

• This might have benefits when doing data migration

• Dynamics 365 is hosted on Azure• SharePoint Online

• OneDrive

• Exchange Online• PowerBI

• Storage space• How much you get is based on User Count

• 5 GB + 2.5 GB additional per 20 Professional / Enterprise users• Can buy additional storage for a monthly fee

• Sandbox and Production storage both count toward total• Consider configuration only Sandbox (Minimal Copy)

• Biggest users of Storage:• Attachments (both Email and Notes)

• Can these be moved to SharePoint or One Drive?

• If choosing SharePoint, the CRM user should be Admin in SharePoint

• System Jobs• Set up recurring jobs to remove old records

• Audit Log• Only turn on audit log if necessary and limit fields

Considerations Before you Begin

• Data Migration• What to migrate:

• How much of data do you want to migrate?• Inactive users?

• If not, which user should own their records• Old records?

• Exclude old activities?• Exclude records that have not been touched for a certain period of time?• Exclude certain type of email and note attachments

• Personal views and charts

• How clean is your data?• De-dup and cleanup data prior to data migration

• Do you want to preserve original Modifiedon/modifiedby?

Considerations Before you Begin

Data Migration

• Tools/Hardware:• Data migration method:

• If fairly small and simple DB: consider using import wizard to migrate data• If midsize DB: consider setting up the jobs on a local machine• If large DB: consider setting up the jobs on a sql server

• Required tools:• Sql server Data tools 2012 or higher

• Kingswaysoft

• Throttling ExecuteMultiple request (used by migration tools)• Can ask support to increase throttle

• Setup jobs as upsert instead of insert• Some fields and certain type of records cannot be updated if they are closed• Remove inserted test records prior to go-live

• Other considerations• Audit logs cannot be migrated

Considerations Before you Begin

Existing Customizations

• CRM Customizations• Re-validate customized processes

• Do you still need them?

• Can they be replaced with new CRM features or better solutions/processes?

• Who did the customizations? Do you have the source code?

• Are all your customizations supported in the current version of Dynamics?

Considerations Before you Begin

Existing Customizations

• Integration with other Systems• Both Reports and ongoing processes

• Do they rely on the CRM database?

• An Internal Database?• i.e. your Data Warehouse

• Do they need to talk to systems that aren’t exposed to the internet?• i.e. your ERP

• What tool are you currently using?

• Are there licensing issues?

• Is this staying on your current server?

Considerations Before you Begin

Making the Move

• Planning is important for a successful move to online• Make sure you know the stakeholders / roles• Checklist of tasks with their timeline

• Create a plan and stick to it

• Communication:• Let users know when important checkpoints are occurring

• When to get out of the old CRM• When the new CRM is available

• Perform migration when users are out of the system• Start after hours on a Friday through the weekend• Based on the number of records data migration can run for a couple of days

Making the Move

• Training

• Who? / When? / How?

• Post cutover testing and validation

• How are you handling issues?

• Outlook Clients / Configuring Mobile users

Planning for Post Migration

Post Go-Live considerations

• How are you going to do ongoing development?

• How are you going to handle backups?

• How are you going to handle upgrades?

• How are you maintaining data going forward?

On-going Development

Sandbox instance

• Do your development and testing here

• Get a free instance with 25 Professional/Enterprise license users

• Storage counts against Quota so consider minimal copy

Create a plan for moving changes from Sandbox to Production

• Create solutions and move changes from Sandbox to production

• Decide on communication plan

Backups

Backups• Automatically taken daily

• Last 3 days• can request back 90 days

from support• Can manually take a backup

• Only lasts 3 days

Upgrades

Upgrades• How are you going to handle these?

• Microsoft’s Update policy says that you can skip one update each year, but then the next update will become mandatory.

• Strongly recommend testing all updates in a Sandbox org first.

You can do this

This process might seem overwhelming but you can do this!

Keys to a successful move to the cloud:

• Upfront research

• Stakeholder identification

• Some thoughtful planning

• A little bit of over communication

Resources

• Online Licensing:• https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn467367.aspx

• Data migration tool:• KingswaySoft: http://www.kingswaysoft.com/

• Online vs. On-premise:• https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/Dynamics/crm-customer-

center/dynamics-365-online-vs-on-premises-features-faq.aspx

Resources

Questions?

Visit us in the Admin Zone!

…Questions?