In the last year, I worked for a company called hammerjack, whose clientele are within the small to mid-size range of businesses in AU. One of the clients I worked with had to move their Dynamics to a new organization — from an on-premise to an online environment. In this post, I just wanted to share a few of things I picked up when moving their data to the target org.
1. Records ownership will still be with the original user, unless that user no longer exists in the target organization during import. Why does this matter? If you’re running reports with numbers tied up to the record owners, it’s a good idea to move all the users from the previous environment to the new one (regardless if literally out of your org already).
2. Pay attention to the business process flow and the corresponding stage a record is in. Imported records somehow don’t apply the stage indicated on the import file (at least, as I have experienced in Opportunity entity) or the business process itself is missing. See image below.
To correct this, I had to update the records found within the business process flow entity.
Source
Target
3. What makes Quote records different is that they can be fine-tuned according to what the potential buyer is capable of paying. Hence, there will be multiple records of the same quote, with an indicator called Revision ID showing the number of times the quote has undergone revision. What I would like to highlight is the stage transition of a quote. When imported, it will always go back to its initial state, which is at draft. To move it to the correct state, I had to setup a workflow that changes just that. Interesting too is that you can skip a state; updating means going through the proper state transitions.
Moving data can be quite cumbersome. For this client, the effort in terms of man-hours was underestimated. I had to stay up until the wee hours to beat the deadline. But it was all worth it because of the discoveries uncovered along the way. đŸ™‚
Striving to Make Things Count 