I recently came across an interesting piece of information about CRM online and how they are addressing the issue of downtime between upgrades. When I first started using CRM I wondered if it was possible to run multiple versions in the same deployment. What I mean is for example Tenent A is 2013 UR1 and Tenent B is version 2015. The obvious answer is no you can’t but I thought that would be very convenient. Part of the reason this wasn’t possible was due to the system design and everything kind of being rolled up into one monolithic system. It’s seems that this may be changing.
In my blog on CRM Carina enhancements I mentioned that part of the problem with downtime for CRM online the fact that organizations needed to be moved to another server and imported. All the time this was happening the service for that customer needed to be shut down so that changes weren’t being made while the upgrade process was happening. Now it seems they have changed this to be able to upgrade a single organization in place independent of the other organizations running within that deployment. Why should you care?
As it stands today anyone doing CRM development has to stand up a totally new environment when they want to develop and test against a newer version of the platform. While we’ve all come to accept this as the status quo you have to admit it’s a hassle. Imagine if all you needed to do was simple create a new organization in your deployment and upgrade it and you were done. I believe with the new enhancements to the CRM online service we are on track to eventually see this same capability in on-premises environments as well. As a matter of general practice you will be able to watch what is happening with CRM online to use as a guideline for what may be coming in CRM on-premises now that online is considered the golden child in the new service based software paradigm Microsoft has started using.
I can only call this a hypothesis, but I feel pretty confident that if I can smell what’s cooking in the kitchen I generally have a good idea what’s about to come out.
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