A few tips to keep you from going customization-crazy

Posted by Kara O'Brien on October 2, 2009  |  Comments (0)

I’ve been working with a customer recently on ideas for managing customizations. Like many organizations, this customer has several environments running Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and many people on staff making form and field changes with the customizations tools, which resulted in some errors when importing the customizations into another environment. There also were a few incidents in which one person’s changes were overwritten by another’s.

Using the handy documentation generator add-in for Microsoft Office Excel 2007, we created a change log that will be managed and updated by one administrator. The documentation generator allows you to load the customizations file from a Dynamics CRM environment, then parses it to compile form, picklist, and script configurations by entity in an Excel spreadsheet – a great tool for anyone who has had to document customizations!  It’s a free download from CodePlex if you’re interested.

I hope a future version of Dynamics CRM has auditing and a rollback feature in the customizations tools, but for now, we’ll make do with a well-defined process to manage the customizations. Here are a few other best practices to help manage customizations:

1. Limit the number of people who make customization changes and if possible, divide ownership of entities so that more than one person isn’t likely to make changes on an entity at the same time.
2. Select one environment (typically a development or test environment) as the master organization for all customizations, and make sure all changes are made and tested there before being exported and imported into another environment.
3. When possible, limit the export to only the entities that were changed.
4. The customizations are stored in the database, so all of the form layouts, client-side script and views are recoverable as long as you’re backing up your MSCRM database regularly.
5. If an entity, attribute, or relationship is deleted, you must remove the object from each environment manually.