If you are upgrading through multiple versions of CRM/Dynamics (i.e. from Microsoft CRM 2011 through CRM 2013/2015/2016 or a more recent version of Microsoft Dynamics) you must follow the steps below to also upgrade your Click solution alongside each new CRM/Dynamics version.
IMPORTANT: This article is related to multi-version upgrades. For information about environment migration or single-version upgrades, see our Migration and Upgrade Scenarios article. Please open a ticket with Click Support if you have any questions prior to your upgrade and/or migration.
- Do NOT update the Click solution prior to upgrading your environment.
If you are upgrading from CRM 2011, begin with Step 2. If you are upgrading from CRM 2013 or later, proceed directly to Step 3.
- In CRM 2011, if you have Update Rollup 17+ installed, prior to upgrading the 2011 org, run the OrgDBOrgSettings tool (a command line tool run on the CRM server) by running the following command:
Crm.SE.OrgDBOrgSettingsTool.exe Update /u <UniqueOrgName> LookupNameMatchesDuringImport True
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2651616 NOTE: You can also run this command after upgrading to CRM 2013. Another option is that Microsoft provides a solution you can import to CRM that provides a graphical UI to change OrgDB settings. You can find this here: https://github.com/seanmcne/OrgDbOrgSettings/releases
It is up to you to determine which to use (the command line tool or the solution). The tools are not supported by Click. If you use the downloadable tool instead of the solution file, you will find included in the zip file with the tool a config file where you can specify how the tool will connect to your environment. This may require some trial and error depending on the settings of your environment, such as DNS, web address properties, IFD, etc. You will then need to update the Microsoft.Crm.SE.OrgDBOrgSettingsTool.exe.config file that is in the folder. The changes that need to be made are highlighted below. Update this file according to the variables in your CRM deployment:
Once you have made the update to the .config file and saved it, you can then open a command line prompt and navigate to the folder where you saved the file.
- Cd C:\OrgDBOrgSettingsTool
- Crm.SE.OrgDbOrgSettingsTool.exe Update <ORG Friendly Name> LookupNameMatchesDuringImport True
Note: If you receive an authentication error when running this command, you have either entered incorrect information in the config file or your CRM web services are not properly configured for your environment. Refer to the CRM Implementation Guide from Microsoft for more information on configuring CRM.
TIP: In some cases, when IFD is already configured on the CRM environment, it can be difficult to get the connection and authentication to work with the config file. Though unsupported, it is possible to manually update this setting in the CRM database. The value ‘LookupNameMatchesDuringImport’ is in the OrganizationBase table in the <YourOrgName>_MSCRM database, and is stored as an XML string in the OrgDbOrgSettings column. By default, the value is “False” (or not set at all). After being set to “True” the value looks like this:
(If you perform this update directly to SQL you will want to perform an IISRESET on the CRM server afterwards. Remember to backup your SQL database prior to making any changes, and that this is a technically unsupported method.)
Using the command line, you can verify that the setting was updated by retrieving the current values using the command line prompt as well, using this command:
- Crm.SE.OrgDbOrgSettingsTool.exe Retrieve <ORG Friendly Name>
- Cd C:\OrgDBOrgSettingsTool
- If you are upgrading from CRM 2013 to CRM 2015, CRM 2016, and/or more recent versions of Dynamics apply the latest Update Rollup from Microsoft after each upgrade step and before proceeding to the next version of CRM/Dynamics.
- Prior to importing the Click solution in the upgraded CRM/Dynamics org, rename the security role “ClickDimensions Lock Email Blocks”. Simply give it a different name, and save it.
- Request the new Click solution for your upgraded environment. Open a support request with Click and provide the following information:
- What version of CRM/Dynamics you have upgraded to
- If the URL or organization name of your CRM database has changed, please provide the old URL/org name, and the new URL/org name
Notes about the upgrade process:
- If your environment is unreachable during the upgrade, Click will queue any data that would have synced to your CRM for up to 7 days, and retry the synchronization when your environment becomes accessible again.
- If you are upgrading through multiple versions of Microsoft Dynamics, Click will be able to continue syncing data to your environment even before you have imported the Click solution for that version of CRM/Dynamics, provided we can connect to it. This allows some flexibility in your upgrade schedule so you can focus on upgrading your environment during off-peak hours, and update the Click solution at a later time (although if your users will need to create templates or send emails, they may have to wait until you have updated the Click solution).
- When upgrading CRM 2011 to 2013, one of the things that Microsoft does is merge tables in the CRM database. In CRM 2011 and previous versions, data was stored in two tables for each entity. It has been reported that an upgrade from CRM 2011 to 2013 can fail when the table merging occurs if some of the data in the tables is unexpected. With Click, it is possible to use Freemarker to create dynamic Subject lines (ie, ${Recipient.contact.firstname![0]}). In some cases, this placeholder for dynamic content may cause the table merge to fail during the upgrade process. This is a limitation of the stored procedure that Microsoft uses for the table merge operation. If you run into this error during an upgrade, or post-upgrade table merge, remove the placeholders from the subject line and other fields on the Email Template and/or Email Send entities and repeat the upgrade/merge process.