Microsoft has been pushing people to move their on-premise deployment to online deployment since 2015. Since everything is moving to the cloud, this move is understandable, right?
I mean, there are loads of benefits that come when you move to Dynamics 365 online: You don’t need to worry about setting up servers, you don’t need data backups, you can access your Dynamics solution anywhere you go as long as you have an Internet connection, and there are many more advantages.
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But there’s one thing we cannot forget and this is a very important point, control. When you decide to migrate your Dynamics solution from on-premise to online deployment, one of the most important things you’ll be giving up is control. Control over your data, control over your services, control over the servers.
There’s a workaround for most of the things that required direct access to the database before. For example, reports should be written in fetchXML, plugins should be registered in Sandbox Isolation mode and, In addition, Microsoft provides a way to replicate the Dynamics 365 database in their data centers with an SQL database you can view in your own Azure Subscription.
What Do You Need to Have?
- Dynamics 365 online instance
- Azure SQL database subscription
- Azure Key Vault subscription
- The data export solution installed in your online instance of Dynamics 365
- System administrator role in Dynamics 365
- Tracking enabled on the entities that will be added to the Export Profile. (This can be done from Settings Customize the system Entity General Enable Change Tracking under Data Services.
- Database users should have these permissions on Database and Schema level:
Database level: Create Table, Create Type, Create View, Create Procedure, Alter Any User
Schema level: ALTER, INSERT, DELETE, SELECT, UPDATE, EXECUTE, REFERENCES.
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How Does It Work?
Once everything is set up correctly and the Data Export Service solution is installed in your online instance, you have to start by setting up a data export profile.
The data export profile is like the container of all the configurations needed on the Dynamics 365 side to make sure the data is moved and synchronized with the destination database. More than one export profile can be created to sync different data to different destination databases.
You should first configure the connection string to your Azure SQL database and add entities that you want to be synchronized. Out of the box entities usually have “change tracking” enabled by default but this needs to be done explicitly for custom entities.
Once Data Export is enabled, it will copy all the data and metadata of the selected entities to the Azure SQL database. Also, in order to save you trouble, the data will always sync in near real time so there’s no need to setup a scheduled service to pull and push data to your Azure database.
For detailed step-by-step information on setup, visit https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt744592.aspx
What Are the Benefits?
If you worked as a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer before, chances are you needed to access the database at some point in your career. Sometimes you need access just to check a value that you cannot really see in the UI provided in Dynamics or, if you want to query the data and join multiple tables to get your result, fetchXML can be pretty limiting.
Having all your data in the palm of your hand can be very beneficial. Also, that way, there can be a workaround to use your old SQL-based reports developed on your on-premise deployment. The data source can be changed to point to the new Azure SQL database and the reports can be hosted on a private report server and there you go!
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Conclusion
What I really love about what Microsoft is doing with Dynamics 365 is that it’s following the cloud trend while keeping in mind the old customers and features they need. There is no doubt that some features are lost with the move to an online deployment; after all, your data could be stored somewhere in Japan for all you know and you can’t do a thing about it.
But Microsoft is paying attention to this subject by making the transition easy and hassle-free, making all the data secure and backed up, and creating ways to give the customers a sense of control over their records.
I see great potential in the Data Export Service, as it can really close the gap between online and on-premise. For now, the setup is not as straightforward as I wished it would be, since you will need someone with some Azure experience to help set it up. But I surely hope that soon, the setup will be further simplified and this could be the key to convincing more people of the move to Dynamics 365 online.
