How can I migrate my data from Microsoft CRM 3.0 to 4.0.2?

Question

hello guys i am new to data migration. My primary goal is to move the data from Microsoft CRM 3.0 to CRM 4.0.2. We are using SQL Server 2008 as our production server. Can anyone advise me on this?

Answer 1

I don't have an immediate answer to your question, but don't downvote me just yet ;) I used to work with a guy who is a whiz at CRM and he could probably answer your question in no time. If you ask nice, and give him the link, He might just come here and answer this question on SO.

Anyway, here is his blog: http://crmscape.blogspot.com/

I am gonna hit him up on Twitter as well and see if he is online...

Answer 2

The CRM SDK may be what you are looking for... you can use the sdk to bulk import records. I wrote a small app that loads a csv file into CRM 4.0. The hardest thing is just getting the setup right in visual studio. You need to use 'add web reference' instead of 'service reference' (which is the vs2008 default).
Edit: As described above, I used C#. I downloaded the MSCRM 4 sdk. There is a sample in the sdk for bulk data import. It requires you to have a data map setup in CRM or tables with the exact same name as the data file that you are loading. I pretty much just copied the code sample that they had with some modifications so that it would work for me.

Answer 3

I just saw Josh's Tweet. There are a few ways to tackle this.

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1 Use the CRM Migration Tool

Can you make a copy of your 3.0 system and upgrade it to 4.0?

If you can Upgrade your CRM 3.0 machine to 4.0 and make sure that it and your new system are at the same rollup level then you can migrate everything across.

The deployment manager has a tool to allow importing an entire organization from another CRM system. Now that CRM supports multi-tenant configurations and companies are supposed to be able to go from offline Hosted solutions to local solutions, they had to create a way to migrate all of that data back and forth.

The key to making this work well is to make sure that you have all of the same CRM users set up on the target system, otherwise you will have to provide it with a choice for remapping the data owned by each CRM user.

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2 Bulk Import

You can export your data to a CSV format to be imported using the provided CRM bulk import tool. Unfortunately this has a lot of limitations.

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3 Custom Import solution

I have an import framework that I have been evolving for a while now that can move data from just about any format into CRM. This is MUCH more powerful than the Bulk import because you can decide exactly how you want things to be migrated. Feel free to contact me if you need this kind of solution. My email can be found off my blog or website.

Try option 1 if you can, option 2 if you only need some of your data and the bulk import tool will bring enough of it over, and option 3 if you can't make option 1 or 2 work for you.