CRM 2013 Upgrade Considerations and Key Platform Enhancements

A great session on Dynamics CRM 2013 upgrade considerations and key platform enhancements by Matt Barbour, Microsoft Senior Program Manager.

Discontinuing support for

• Windows Server 2003
• Windows XP
• IE7
• Exchange 2003
• Reworking some of the accelerators several have been around since v4
• This is a one way upgrade
• Must upgrade from ur6 or ur14 or higher. CRM 2011 MUST be on one of these patches or the upgrade will refuse to complete
• Supporting both in place and migration updates
• Base and extension tables are merging in this release
  • Reason, improved performance (no joins), less locks, better design
• Merge tool is suggested for large data sets. Guidance will be coming on size for when to use merge tool vs during the upgrade
• Two new services added, CSS writer and monitoring service
• VSS writer – online backup support for CRM, meaning live backup, SCOM support
• Monitoring service – health monitoring, will support only 1 test/check for Orion, more tests to be added to future releases, integrates with SCOM pack
• Email Connector service – email router v2, this will be part of CRM, no longer need to install email connector separately.
  • Today only works on like for like, either online only or on-premise only, this will change in future
• Solutions, 2011 will import smoothly into CRM 2013, suggest partners install CRM 2013 dev instance, upgrade the CRM 2011 components and feautes to 2013, then create new 2013 solutions, then use these for updating production systems

CRM versioning system changes (improvements and consistency)

Major.minor.UR/lob.build

• CRM 2013 “Orion” is 6.0.0000.xxxx
• If second number changes, these are feature changes, adds
• If 3rd number changes, these are bands or fixes
• R2, service lack, feature lack, mean Minor update
• Update roll ups are
• Fixes and security only…no more feature adds

Other new adds

• OAuth authentic a model, required for IFD deployments
• Can’t speak yet about OpenID support
• New image data type
• Added left outer join to fetchxml (woohoo!!!)

Real time workflow

• Transaction aware
• Supports both pre and post pipeline support
• Security aware
• Fits existing workflows can be converted to workflows

Actions / PBL / Business Rules

Access teams (woohoo!!!)

• Supports team selling scenarios, enhances security model
• Works the way you do
• Adding a user records grants them specific access
• Can have multiple access teams per entity
• E.g. Teams that come in nod do out at different times of a process
• Ownership vs collaboration
• Does not require team ownership of records
• Scalable for large number of dynamic teams
• When to use Access teams.
  • When number of users are dynamic and fluid, use team ownership
  • When number of team’s are fixed, use access teams