Today’s guest blogger is Jacob Cynamon-Murphy, a Sales Engineer at Sonoma Partners.
It's coming. The next release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Codename: Orion. Official name: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. Are you ready?
With some legacy features being removed from Dynamics CRM - most prominent among them CRM 4.0 JavaScript APIs and .NET web services - it's our goal to give you straightforward guidance to help you get your CRM system in shape for the upgrade process. In an effort to help our customers be proactive in their preparation, we have prepared a flow chart that you can use to determine how ready your CRM customizations are for upgrade to CRM 2013.
Key things to note:
- There will be revised software requirements for CRM 2013 on-premises deployments, but these requirements are not yet public. Because of this, we are not including them on the flow chart.
- The Legacy Feature Check Tool, called out as (1) in the diagram, is available for download. You can run it against your CRM 2011 instance to find out changes you need to make to your server-side code. It may not detect infrequently executed components, like command-line apps, but it's a great start to help you find and upgrade legacy code. It is also slated to execute as part of the organization upgrade process when you undergo a CRM 2013 upgrade.
- Microsoft has posted the Custom Code Validation Tool for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 for download. Noted as (2) in the flow chart, this tool will examine your JavaScript web resources for code that is either a) incompatible with cross-browser support or b) uses the old CRM 4.0 script API, which is going away in CRM 2013.
Following the upgrade, we strongly advise adapting your system to take advantage of some of the powerful new capabilities in Dynamics CRM 2013, like business process flows, portable business logic, and quick view forms, to name a few. We'll discuss these new features in depth in future blog posts. We'll also address the broader concern of organizational readiness.
If you find this to be a bit overwhelming, we can help you get from the start to the finish easily and without frustration. Contact us at Sonoma Partners and we'll help you navigate the upgrade process.