Let’s face it. Many members of the SMB Nation community are happily situated at the Microsoft Action Pack (MAPS) membership-level inside the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN). Fair enough. But did you know that, with the recent June 30/July 1 renewal date, MAPS has a hidden jewel just waiting for your consumption. It’s related to the five (5) Internal Use Rights (IUR) for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan Enterprise Edition. This is real value and I’m going to share with you my journey, up-to-the-minute as of this writing.
Bekker’s Partner’s Guide
My journey started when I read Scott Bekker’s IUR posting (Bekker is a colleague who works for Redmond Channel Partner magazine). His missive imparted details about the five IUR licenses for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan Enterprise Edition in MAPS. Prior to that, I hadn’t been aware of this benefit. You can download Bekker’s guide here.
The timing couldn’t have been better for two reasons.
Cost
SMB Nation has 50,000+ contacts as a long-time community. We have migrated over the years from Microsoft CRM 1.2 to NetSuite to Salesforce and back to Microsoft CRM Dynamics 365 on-prem. We have been happily paying $60/seat per month for our licenses. But the MAPS offer is just too juicy to pass up – the IUR licenses (count ‘em – five) are effectively free after you pay your MAPS annual subscription fee of $475. My current annual CRM financial commitment is 3x that amount and only because we conserve our license usage (can’t wait to do more with more licenses!).
Get Appy!
As many readers know, I’ve spread my wings over the past few years playing in Seattle startups in addition to running SMB Nation. At the Big Data startup LeadScorz, we worked with Versium. Fast forward the movie and Versium has a Dynamics 365 app called Predict that provides insights, appends records and intelligence to your CRM contacts, leads and accounts. It has very basic scoring models but the good news is that it’s free. I’ll write more about Predict at a future date but the point is, that with my current Dynamics 365 on-prem implementation, I couldn’t use Predict (it’s only on the cloud-side aka Microsoft Online Services). Ergo – my motivation to conduct the migration asap to my new CRM instance.
Looking Back
First – proper context needed. Here are the exact details of my current CRM instance: (Version 1612 (8.2.2.112) (DB 8.2.2.2.112) on-premises (SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1). While I’m happy with Dynamics 365, I’m wanting to get more appy as per above (plus there are hundreds of more apps to play with). In Figure 1 – you can see my current environment.
Figure 1: This be our existing CRM instance!
Looking Forward
To level-set, I’m migrating this offering: for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan Enterprise Edition (Version 9). When I renewed MAPS, and I assigned out a couple of my IUR licenses, I then wanted to “run” my CRM instance but it wasn’t clear at all how to do this. So I filed a service request with Microsoft and worked with a support professional to stand-up my new CRM instance.
SECRET: The key is to select Dynamics 365 via Admin centers on the lower portion of your left-side column in the Microsoft 365 admin center console. You’ll answer questions about production v. sandbox and what module you want to activate. See the results in Figure #2.
Figure 2: The instance setup procedure results in the following instance. But there is much more work to be done.
Migration Madness
Initially in my “simple is hard” technology paradigm, I thought I’d just do a lift-and-shift or forklift migration from my existing CRM instance into the new instance. I asked my current CRM hoster to export the database which resulted in the following files seen in Figure 3.
Figure 3: My current CRM database files exceed 10GB.
But after researching this lift-and-shift migration approach and consulting with the fine people on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM group (Facebook), it was none other than SMB Nation fan Julie Yack who educated me that this is both a migration and an upgrade (plus we have limited customizations).
So it’s been a “back to the drawing boards” circular reference as I’m trying to complete this work over the long 4th of July holiday week/weekend when the private sector is napping. Another call with Microsoft support suggested I output my existing database to an Excel file so it can be imported into my new CRM instance. I’m in the process of doing that now with these steps in my existing CRM instance:
• Select data area (e.g. Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Reports, Marketing Lists, etc.)
• Select Funnel (advanced find) in upper right
• Select Edit Columns, Click OK
• Select Add columns
• Select ALL COLUMNS by clicking the checkbox next to Display Name
• Click OK
• Click OK
• Click Results (this can take a long time to run)
• Click Export Accounts
• Select Dynamic Worksheet
• Select Export on the Edit Columns dialog
Then – in theory – I’d import the contacts, et al into the new CRM instance. Read “even I could do it!” But I have hit a time-out condition/error because of the number of contacts I have, etc. See Figure 4.
Figure 4: I can’t export 50,000 contacts successfully at once – one person has told me I’ll have to do smaller exports (think letters A-J; K-S; T-Z).
And there you have it. I’m at mid-point in my migration trading notes with Yack to successfully land this migration!
In my next blog, I’ll let you know how it goes!