Upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013: One Vendor's Experience

With the general availability of the Dynamics CRM Online Fall '13 (Orion) update, Dynamics CRM ISVs are working to quickly get their products updated and fully tested for the new release.  We spoke with Jerry Weinstock, a CRM MVP and owner of CRM Innovation, which makes add-on solutions for Dynamics CRM and provides implementation services. The company recently announced that their solutions are ready for CRM 2013, in sync with Microsoft's general availability of the release.

MSDW: What has the process been like to upgrade CRM Innovations' solutions for CRM 2013?

Jerry Weinstock: We started a couple months ago during the beta program looking to identify necessary code changes. We couldn't make definitive code changes until the RC1 build of CRM 2013 was available. As a result our efforts have been weighted toward the most recent time period. We've created 2013 managed solutions for our two cloud based apps and one add-on that is installed with a plugin on the CRM Server.

The process involved steps like running a Microsoft utility to check Javascript code, and examining our hosted apps that use web services to make sure we have updated end points and are not using incompatible SDK API calls.

What are the biggest changes you've had to address?

There were a lot of changes to make to accommodate the new form layouts. Javascript had to be updated to be ready for the new 2013 environment, modifying them to work in the new style forms rather than the classic CRM4/2011 multi-window layouts. We had to rewrite all the code that used ActiveX.  We have functional 2013 versions, but some features of our solutions that are secondary we have let slide ...