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Preparing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 (Formerly Code-named Orion)

Post Author: Joe D365 |

As you may or may not have heard, a new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM called CRM 2013 is headed our way! This blog will discuss items to review while thinking about this upgrade. The CRM 2013 upgrade path requires the CRM system be on CRM 2011. Those currently running CRM 4.0 or earlier will have to follow the upgrade path to CRM 2011 before going to CRM 2013.

Let's talk about the impact to the various deployment types:

CRM Online Customers: Microsoft intends to upgrade all CRM Online customers to CRM 2013 between October and early January 2014. An email notification of your planned upgrade date will be sent to a number of addresses involved with your CRM organization. Customers will have the ability to reschedule to available time slots up to two hours before the upgrade appointment. Customers will need to provide two potential upgrade dates.

Partner-Hosted and On-Premise CRM customers: PowerObjects will work with those wishing to upgrade their partner-hosted or on-premise CRM systems using our proven upgrade process. To serve those without test environments, we will be offering the ability to test the upgrade in our datacenter before running the upgrade in production.

Is your CRM 2011 organization ready to upgrade to CRM 2013?

CRM 2011 was a little forgiving with "old code" in that there was some backward compatibility to CRM 4.0 JavaScript, service endpoint URLs, and custom code. As we moved toward cross-browser support, we started to lose that compatibility and options had to be set to support some of these functions in 2011.

With CRM 2013, legacy support for CRM 4.0 references are no longer available. That's why it's important to know if your current CRM 2011 system is "up to code" (forgive the pun). Fortunately there are ways to find out.

First, check your organization to see if HTC support is enabled. This checkbox is located at Settings, Administration, System Settings, Customization tab.Preparing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013

If this box is not checked and your forms are working in all browsers, your Javascript should be fine for CRM 2013 but there is something else we should do to make sure. If this box is checked, we should find out if there is a reason why.

Next, run the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Custom Code Validation Tool. The tool needs to be downloaded and then imported to CRM 2011. When the solution is imported, double click the solution record called "Custom Code Validation Tool," then click the button to load the tool. This tool reviews your CRM web resources for compatibility with CRM 2011. Run through each file and make sure there are no issues found.Preparing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 (Formerly Code-named Orion)

Ideally all of the script in your web resources will pass validation and we could go out for ice cream, but if not, the issues to really look out for are related to discovering old CRM 4.0 script such as crmForm, DataValue, etc. If you find these items, you will need to update your web resources prior to moving to CRM 2013.

Note: The key at the top of the screen indicates that underlined items that may be OK with HTC support. Remember, HTC support is not available in CRM 2013.

In addition to checking the form scripts, custom code such as plugins, external resources such as custom aspx pages and web services URLs should be checked. CRM online users are off the hook here because backward compatibility of these items was not provided for CRM 2011 Online.

For partner-hosted or on-premise folks, the source code for plugins will need to be reviewed for compatibility. This is something that should be done by a developer, or if your plugin was provided by a third party, request an updated version that is compatible with CRM 2011.

Microsoft has said that support for the ISV folder will be dropped with CRM 2013. This location was commonly used by developers to deliver custom aspx pages. Use IIS to explore the ISV folder under the Microsoft Dynamics CRM website to learn if your solution relies upon anything in the ISV folder. Items that are found there should be replaced with solutions that can be created as web resources within CRM 2011.

Integrations or applications that rely upon CRM web services should be checked to make sure they are using the 2011 version of the endpoint URLs. To learn what your CRM 2011 service endpoint URLs are, go to Settings, Customizations, Developer Resources in CRM 2011.

That pretty much covers the things that could "break" CRM 2013, but clearing these tests doesn't mean it's time for ice cream quite yet. You will want to think about reworking your forms for the new process based forms being delivered with CRM 2013, and everyone should be provided upgrade training so your users don't "break" J. If you have an opportunity to test CRM 2013 before diving in, you should take it.

PowerObjects will be your partner of choice throughout the upcoming weeks, as we're currently preparing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 with a slew of training and educational resources, and additional information will be delivered through our blog.

If you'd like more information on supported JavaScript for this upgrade, please visit CRM 2011 Useful JavaScript Tidbits.

We love CRM and we're excited for the new version. We hope you are too. If you're ready for that ice cream now, we'll be happy to help or even do all the heavy lifting for you, just give us a call.

Happy upgrading!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

5 comments on “Preparing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 (Formerly Code-named Orion)”

  1. Hi Joe, I'm a recent adopter of CRM, starting with 2011 On-Premise running on Hyper-V. I moved my business from Salesforce to CRM in December of last year and it was the best decisions I could have made. We have CRM 2011 IFD with Win Server 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 R2.

    However, there are some key areas of concern for me, one of which has always been the quoting process from within CRM. Can you talk a little about any improvements which have been made to Dynamics CRM 2013 over 2011 with regard to actually printing quotes and the painful (20 step or so) process by which we export data to Word using mail merge?

    Also, why does Microsoft continue to support this process when they already have an effective answer for it within Accounting Professional 2009 (now EOL/retired)? By the end of Accounting Pro's life, Microsoft had created the ability to click a button and email to PDF directly, create and manage really powerful XML driven Word documents as templates, dynamically expanding tables based on number of line items, etc... Is there any light at the end of the tunnel with CRM 2013? The current quoting process is not one which we want to support, its way too cumbersome and leaves so many points for simple human error. I would really like to use quoting in CRM to create electronic PDF quotes without having to manually merge items, create multiple templates for multiple line items, individually customize default data mapping for each template, save, name, save to pdf, rename files only to store them in a single network folder. SharePoint is a solution we will be adopting next year, but that only solves the problem of pathway to save location, it really doesn't do much for the process itself. My staff needs to be able to create a quote in less than 30 seconds, send to Outlook and email via PDF. Anything more is quite frankly, not usable.

    Any insight or thoughts on this subject would be very helpful. The more important problems for me at least are every day minor limitations like this one. Now, to be completely fair to Microsoft, I am not complaining... Salesforce and Act and every other CRM package I've ever seen does not print quotes even remotely as well. So, a 20 step process is actually an improvement, it's just not a practical one in which we can rely on. Thank you in advance for your thoughts on this issue as it pertains to CRM 2013 out of the box.

  2. Have anybody recognized any change in CRM 2011 with IFD which will be taking part into up gradation from 2011 to 2013?

    1. Hi - From what we have seen the IFD part with crm 2013 is basically the same which is pretty neat. We have configured a few crm 2013 enviroments and the IFD / ADFS portion has not changed much.

  3. Hey Joe - we just implemented CRM 2011 within the past 30 days - mainly because we couldn't get 2013. We placed some data services inside of the ISV folder so that we could avoid the cross-domain posting issues with JSON. Now that the ISV folder is gone away - any insight into where we can move our code? Our issue is that these need to run in the same domain as CRM, or else we'd have to refactor all of our web resources that consume these services to use JSONP - which turned out to be a real pain when we were developing.

  4. We are planning to upgrade from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2013. We upgraded successfully to CRM 2011, but when trying to upgrade to CRM 2013 we get plugin errors.
    We have a few custom created plugins such as "IntActionNow".

    LegacyFeatureCheck gives following:
    -------------------------------------------------

    Warning
    PluginAssembly
    23091cac-b900-4cab-abf8-3ef785cda7a9
    Assembly "IntActionNow" with version '1.0.0.0' references the CRM 4.0 SDK.

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