Listen to the Voice of Experience: Decisions That Help or Hinder a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Upgrade

From planning, to people, to tools, there are a number of things you need to do - or not do - when you roll out a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 upgrade.

Chris Cognetta, Tribridge's Sr. Escalation Manager and a newly minted Dynamics CRM MVP, shared some tips with attendees at the recent CRMUG Summit.

"A lot of times people will come into an upgrade and want to change something that's broken," he said. "Our best practice is not to change business processes during the upgrade process. Our best process is to follow them up after the upgrade has taken place in a phase two."

Cognetta said because there are over 500 new features in Dynamics CRM 2011, turning some of those features on from the start makes users more wary of moving to the new version.

"So what we like to do is show them in their user acceptance training, here's where you are, here's how you used to do it and here's how you're doing it now and then follow up in that second phase," Cognetta said. "So, for example, we're not going to build any new dashboards [during rollout] . . . or anything that's going to interrupt a business process."

There are some features you might want to turn on during roll out like auditing to solve a business need because that's not going to interrupt a business process, he said. "All of the features that would be turned on or off would be determined before user acceptance testing, and they would be testing while users are testing the system because you don't want to turn anything on in ...