Solution mess

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Posted on by Elowy GrootCRM

Hello community,

A client of mine has two Dynamics environments: development and production. Unfortunately, over the years the use of (custom) solutions has become quite messy. Most custom solutions (30+) are unmanaged, but here and there are also some managed solutions between them (around 10).

Ideally, I would like to consolidate all customizations into a single managed solution and then properly apply ALM. But I’m unsure about the best strategy to merge everything.

At the moment, I’m thinking the best approach might be to find the oldest managed solution that still exists in development and add all later customizations to it. Then deploy that to production and afterwards remove all (later) managed and unmanaged solutions.

Would this work? Or does anyone have a better idea?

Thanks!
Elowy

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Dynamics 365 Sales

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MVP-Daniyal Khaleel

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Solution mess

Unmanaged solutions modify the base layer directly, they do not have “boundaries.”
Once imported, the changes exist in the environment even if the solution is deleted.
Managed solutions layer on top of the base system (and unmanaged customizations sit on top of them).
You cannot “merge” unmanaged and managed solutions directly. You need to rebuild a clean managed one.

Step	Action	Goal
1	Inventory all solutions & layers	Understand overlaps
2	Build new clean unmanaged solution	Centralize all components
3	Export as managed	Clean, deployable package
4	Test in sandbox	Validate
5	Deploy to production	Consolidate
6	Apply proper ALM	Prevent future mess