CRM 2015 Upgrade: A Few Things You Can Prepare Ahead of Time

CRM 2015, which had been referred to as Vega or v7, offers some exciting new features and enhancements. Some customers, especially on premise customers, are interested to know what they can prepare ahead of time to make their upgrade process faster, more efficient, and improve user experience. This blog post covers a few items that can be prepared ahead of time prior to CRM 2015 upgrade. There are obvious benefits of doing this: less tasks to perform during the upgrade and less time required to upgrade. And don’t forget, users appreciate shorter maintenance window as well.

.NET 4.5 Installation
CRM 2015 Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5. If you don’t already have .NET 4.5 installed, CRM 2015 installer will attempt to install .NET 4.5 as part of prerequisites. Reboot is required with .NET 4.5 installation. To speed up your upgrade process, you can take care of this requirement ahead of time: install .NET 4.5 and reboot your server. Then you are good to go.

Table Merge
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and earlier versions maintained two database tables for each entity. A base table contains out-of-the-box fields and an extension table contains custom fields. In CRM 2013, base table and extension table are merged into one table to reduce SQL deadlocks and performance related issues. CRM 2013 allowed customers to defer table merging to avoid upgrade performance and timing problems, it could also be done for customers who had to accommodate unsupportable reads against CRM’s base tables, giving them time to upgrade and eradicate unsupported SQL access.  Deferring the merge was optional and had to be pre-configured – if you have already upgraded to 2013 and did not configure a registry value to defer table merge the CRM 2013 upgrade has already merged your tables for you, automatically.

To check table merged or not, customer can run this query against the organization database to find out the entities that haven’t been merged.

SELECT e.Name, e.ExtensionTableName
FROM EntityView e
where e.IsActivity = 0
and e.ExtensionTableName is not null 
and e.IsIntersect = 0 
and e.IsLogicalEntity = 0
order by e.Name

If you have deferred your table merge, the CRM 2015 upgrade process will merge base table and extension tables automatically. The CRM 2013 Merge tool has been removed and registry key to prevent table merging is no longer valid in CRM 2015. Customers who have not performed tables merge in CRM 2013, can consider to perform table merge prior to upgrade to CRM 2015.  If you have deferred, merging your tables will help reduce upgrade time during the CRM 2015 upgrade.

Forms Design
CRM 2013 introduced a new form model. The 2013 form comes with several new features. After CRM 2013 upgrade, 2011 information forms are moved over along with 2013 forms. While CRM 2015 upgrade will carry over both set of forms, it is recommended to migrate to 2013 forms. New features and functionality are only available to 2013 forms. You can migrate your forms either prior to CRM 2015 upgrade or migrate them over time. If forms are migrated prior to upgrade, users can immediately take advantage of new features and functionalities for the new forms.

For more information about form upgrade, Brandon Kelly has published a great article--CRM 2013 Form Upgrade experience.

Supported Configurations
To upgrade to CRM 2015, you can upgrade only from CRM 2013 SP1 or higher versions. If your CRM environment is not running on CRM 2013 SP1 or higher versions, it is necessary to perform upgrade first.

The table below show supported configurations for servers and clients. Make sure your environment is running on supported configuration, we also have a blog article highlighting the supported configuration details for CRM 2015 here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crminthefield/archive/2014/05/19/important-information-about-supported-configurations-in-the-next-version-of-crm.aspx

Table 1. Supported configurations

Table 2. Configuration no longer supported

 For most up-to-date information, please reference Compatibility with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015.

Questions?

Do you have additional questions with Dynamics CRM 2015 upgrade readiness? Post a comment below, or contact us directly. We would love to hear from you!