Switching from a legacy business tool to a Dynamics 365-based solution will inevitably require data migration. In such a case, you will need to establish a reliable data migration roadmap to help you make the complex and risky migration process more manageable and guide your team throughout the project.
In this article, experts from Itransition, a UK Dynamics 365 partner with 10+ years of ERP and CRM solutions delivery experience, provide an actionable Dynamics 365 data migration roadmap you can use as a blueprint and also share tips to help you plan and execute the migration successfully.
An optimal Dynamics 365 data migration roadmap
1. Planning
- Assess the existing IT ecosystem and the implemented Dynamics 365 platform to understand whether their data structures are compatible or if some additional configurations of the new system will be required.
- Based on your business continuity needs, cost considerations, and other factors, choose a suitable migration approach, such as big bang, incremental, or parallel.
- Set the project’s budget and establish its timeline.
- Define KPIs to later measure data migration success against your business goals and objectives.
- Taking into account your technical needs, security requirements, and cost constraints, select relevant data migration tools (Data Import Wizard, Data Management Framework, Azure Data Factory, etc.).
- Finally, establish a data migration team, either from your in-house IT specialists or outsourced experts.
2. Data preparation
- Catalog all data selected for the migration and carefully review it for quality, detecting issues like incompleteness, inconsistencies, or duplicates.
- Fix identified issues through data cleansing, deduplication, standardization, and missing value handling.
- Create backup copies of your data to be able to restore it in cases of data corruption or loss during the transfer process.
3. Process setup and testing
- Begin this phase with mapping data fields between a source system and the Dynamics 365 system and setting up data transformation rules needed to make data compatible with the target system.
- Define and document the migration workflow and all stages your data will pass through during the migration, including ingestion, transformation, loading, and validation.
- Set up and configure the Dynamics 365 system to ensure it can receive data from a legacy system.
- Set up a sandbox Dynamics 365 environment and conduct a small test migration with dummy data to validate your migration approach and tools before moving on to real datasets.
4. Execution and validation
- Extract data from the legacy system, perform necessary transformations, and upload it into the Dynamics 365 system using selected migration tools.
- Verify that the data was transferred properly and that no data was lost during the migration and, if needed, use the backup to recover data gaps.
- Run performance, integration, and user acceptance tests to validate that the target Dynamics 365 system works as expected.
5. Post-migration maintenance
- Continuously monitor the Dynamics 365 system to detect and fix any possible data quality issues in order to ensure business continuity.
Useful practices for Dynamics 365 data migration
To maximize the chances that your data migration success, adhere to the following recommendations when planning and executing a project:
- Establish a golden configuration environment
Inconsistent configurations between multiple project environments (development, testing, production, etc.) during Dynamics 365 data migration can lead to data schema mismatches, business logic failures, and other issues. To prevent inconsistency in environment configurations, implement a “golden” configuration environment, which is a dedicated environment for storing a validated and finalized setup of all your configuration data (chart of accounts, currency codes, etc.). Acting as a single source of truth for all system configurations, it can help ensure consistency across environments.
- Take into account Dynamics 365 API limits
Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Dataverse (the primary data storage for most Dynamics 365 systems) employ a set of API limits, and if a migration tool exceeds these limits with a large volume of API requests, Microsoft can block or delay them. This can lead to a significant drop in data throughput, so the entire migration process can take a lot more time than initially intended. To bypass API limits, you can consider splitting large datasets into batches and transferring them using batch API calls to reduce the total API request count. Additionally, as API limits are typically applied on a per-user basis, you can distribute data migration threads across multiple Dynamics 365 user accounts.
- Conduct multiple rounds of migration tests
Take an iterative approach to migration testing and execute multiple rounds of tests (integration tests, performance tests, user acceptance tests, etc.) in sandbox environments before the final go-live. After each round, use the documented findings to update the testing scope, adjust testing scenarios, and plan the next round of QA activities. Repeat this cycle until data quality and system performance meet your predefined acceptance criteria. This way, you can ensure that your new Dynamics 365 system is stable and reliable.
Final thoughts
A structured roadmap is the backbone of a successful Microsoft Dynamics 365 data migration, as it defines the goals, scope, and milestones of the project, transforming it into a step-by-step, manageable process. To design and build an efficient Dynamics 365 data migration roadmap, you can use the example of a roadmap from this article as a foundation.
Also, if you recognize that you lack in-house expertise to build a reliable data migration roadmap, you should not necessarily delay the migration project and instead turn to Dynamics 365 consultants to help you with this. They can audit your current system and analyze your data to create a tailored data migration roadmap, and if needed, help you with the technical execution and validation of the migration.
