Upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Rimrock Corporation staff are highly experienced upgrading Dynamics CRM 3.0 or Dynamics CRM 4.0 to Dynamics CRM 2011. Our upgrade reference include deployments that are both CRM Online or CRM premise based.

There is much more to a Dynamics CRM upgrade than meets the eye. We help our clients with upgrade considerations such as:

Dynamics CRM Upgrade Paths – Clients need to decide if their upgrade should be a normal “in place” upgrade, if they should connect an existing instance of Dynamics CRM to a new instance , or alternatively clients can consider installing a new instance of Dynamics CRM and then perform a data import.

Dynamics CRM Upgrade Requirements – Clients need to consider what sort of servers hardware is best for the site, which SQL database version to use, how best to configure the new eMail router, whether the existing Outlook client used will meet the upgrade requirement. Of particular importance is to plan for meeting the authentication and Internet Facing Deployment (IFD) requirements.

Dynamics CRM Upgrade Project Planning Considerations - When preparing an upgrade project plan, there are numerous considerations that will impact the time and effort estimate. These include choosing an upgrade and rollback strategy, Deploy IFD, planning server roles, plans for CRM URL changes and understand 3^rd party product upgrade procedures. Custom ASPX pages will need to be reviewed as well as the impact of the upgrade on plug ins and work-flows. User hardware and or operating system upgrades must be taken into account, as well as planning for users with offline Outlook data.

Dynamics CRM Test Upgrades – Test upgrades are essential because they identify what might break as a result of the upgrade. They are also serve to to identify how long the upgrade might take and the test environment provides clients with a testing environment for future development as well as a learning environment for staff.

Dynamics CRM Upgrade Optimization – There are a number of things you can do to maximize the efficiency of your upgrade project. Optimization tasks such as SQL maintenance, workflow clean up, database table clean up and data purging as well as shutting down integration’s should be considered.

Dynamics CRM Post Upgrade Tasks – One your data has been upgraded to the new version of CRM, there are number of tasks to complete. The base form layout in CRM 2011 changed significantly resulting in the need for customization and plug in’s rewrites. Workflow and SSRS reports will still function as designed. Changing the CRM server will result in both the CRM URL and the dynamic Excel reports will no longer functioning.