Welcome to Migration Minded,
the Dynamics 365 web series,
where we dig into important
modernization considerations with
Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM experts to
help support your Cloud transformation
thinking. My name is Tom Wisniewski, I'm a
Global Product Marketing Manager for Dynamics
365, today have a great episode for you.
We're talking to 9 year Microsoft MVP
Chris Cognetta on why move to the Cloud,
his top migration considerations
and how advancements have helped
improve the process over the years.
Chris also shares an amazing story on
migrating a customer during a hurricane and
how it effectively helped save their business.
Based in Tampa, FL,
Chris is the CTIO of congruentX.
So with that let's just get started.
Hey Chris, how's it going?
Hey Tom thanks for having me good to be here
and talking about data migrations today.
So Chris,
today we're going to be talking about how
migrations have changed over the years,
in particular, how advancements have
helped make them easier on customers.
But before we get into all that,
I'd really like to just ask you know,
you've helped over 250
customers migrate to the Cloud,
what are you thinking about when
customers come to you with this request?
Yeah, that's a good question.
You know,
as a partner you know we have to add
value by helping customers understand
the decision to migrate to the Cloud.
And some of these customers who
are still running the on-premises
version of the dynamic software
still running several years behind,
maybe 2011-2013 versions of the software.
So the first thing we start to look at or
ask is how do you use the system today?
Is it still working for you?
When it was designed
it was probably designed around
a business process that's likely
7 to 10 years old.
Is it still effective?
So it's it's really more of talking through
what they're trying to do and accomplish.
And if we're going to meet those
outcomes versus just upgrading the
system from a technology lift, sure
you can technology move it
from platform to platform,
but there's so much more.
I mean,
moving from the 2011-2013 timeframe
to the new version 9.0 you probably
talking 1,500 new features so
there's a lot of different
ways to solve some of the problems
where we used to write code for.
An a lot of times it's like
we go back clean up,
go back to out of the box
modules if that makes sense.
Yeah, that makes complete sense,
so that's great.
So that's what you're thinking about
as you're helping customers migrate
through having these conversations right?
But what would you say is
maybe top of mind on the customer's
mind as they start thinking about
migrating to the Cloud and
start going through this journey?
Yeah, number one has to be security.
Everyone is concerned about
security in the Cloud.
Access to my data.
Will someone take it away from
me and really with Office 365,
A lot of customers already
have Office 365 as the as the
beginning installation so to speak.
And when they've done that,
they've already had the conversations
with their CTIO's and their SISO's on
how do we federate with the Cloud
so that being done it makes it much
easier to bring on a different
component of the Power Platform.
Whether it's Dynamics CRM AX,
Power BI, all those capabilities,
really that's the beauty of them
all working together so that single-
sign-on experience and knowing that
you're you've already been approved
through security to do that makes
it much easier when migrating to
Cloud for security.
So that's certainly one of the first ones.
The other is, you know,
how do you support it, right?
Do I need my IT resources still
looking at files and logs?
Or who's responsible for backups?
Where does it live?
What if there's a disaster?
How do I get to it? Recently with
COVID that has become a huge factor,
we've been able to actually use the
Cloud to help customers who didn't
plan for any things like that,
and it was a very fast migration
process for them.
But overall,
I think you know you have security.
You have the conversations about
access to the system,
and then you have the conversations
around both the data aspects and the
business process before going live.
And would you say there's anything
particularly motivating
customers right now
to move to the Cloud?
You know that's a good question without
having the ability to have those webinars,
and you know I spent a lot of time
working with customers at these
webinars on site three or four times a year.
These big events and usually get a
lot of feedback from the audience.
You know,
I love to ask the question how many
people are still on 2011-2013?
You know and that number's been dwindling
down over the years, right?
Last time I think it was like
25% of the room and I was like,
well,
what are the rest of you here for right?
You guys are on Cloud already and
they really just wanted to know about
hurdles and challenges and
things that they may have come across,
but I would say that from
a market perspective,
Cloud, Azure adoption, AI are big
reasons for people to move to the
Cloud when you look at Dynamics,
there's so much more that's not
just the Dynamics platform.
Now it's the Power Platform.
It's leveraging things like Power
Automate, Power
BI,
you can still leverage some of those
things against on-premise systems,
but the true power comes when it's
connected to the Cloud and that allows you
to have faster deployments,
it allows you to, for instance,
we were talking about database copies,
right?
If your on-premise today,
you're calling up your IT shop saying hey,
we want to refresh the sandbox instance.
Let's schedule a weekend when we're
going to copy the production database
down over to the other system.
Let's reconnect it in SQL.
I mean, you're talking about
a couple hours worth of work,
possibly some challenges.
Where in the new online world
it's copy production to sandbox.
Press the button in less than
10 minutes you have a new you have
a new environment ready to go.
So lots of advantages,
especially time to market for
your customers as well as support
you got a problem in production,
you keep having an error message
you need to go look at it.
Do you want your team to have to go off
in your production instance to look at it?
Or can you simply copy the production
instance down as it is and then look at
it right there and see the same errors
the same logs and fix it
and then push back to fix.
So lots of advantages.
That's great and then
from your work in helping
all of these customers migrate,
Is there a particular story that
sort of highlights you know this
motivation and the challenges?
Absolutely, absolutely. So.
I was at one of those conferences.
It was about three years ago.
It was the last.
Day of the conference and this
lady approached me and asked,
hey,
we're having this problem with
our current Cloud provider.
We need to migrate off of the system
at the same time there was a hurricane
going on so everything was locked
down and I was like wow, you know.
So there if you think about Florida when we
don't take hurricanes lightly right lots,
lots of water.
That type of damage datacenters. To have a
datacenter in Florida is pretty scary.
You're definitely going to have
to have fault redundant systems,
you're going to have to have a backup site.
Hot sites, those kind of things because
you never know what's going to happen, right?
Well?
This person was running into that.
Not only was their Cloud contract expiring,
but they also sorry their on-premise
contract was expiring and their
Cloud provider they were looking
for someone to help them so we were
able to actually sit there in the
last two hours of that session.
Bring up a Dynamics instance,
import over their accounts and contacts
and they had no loss of business
during the storm and their
environment did go down.
So it was extremely fast,
extremely efficient.
Now obviously that's not the
use case for everybody, right?
This was a very small company,
20 seats with the ability to just import
very newly used data into the system,
but the point was is that we were able
to get them up in the Cloud really fast.
No additional spending for hardware,
so didn't have to go buy
servers or any of that stuff.
The environment was what they're
used to using in Dynamics.
And combine that with Office they
absolutely loved it and never went back.
So it was a great exercise to both
help a customer in need and really
teach the power of the Cloud.
That's fantastic, so you know I'm
hearing there are a lot of great
reasons to move to the Cloud, right?
What do you think -
Or what would you say a
company that has made
this decision to migrate -
What are the first things that they
should be thinking about as a business
before actually starting the journey?
Yeah, I think there's a lot
of things that people forget.
The first thing is,
it's not just a technology project, right?
Technology
y.ou can move migrate over to a platform.
But really, what's the business need?
What are we going to do as far as what
is the business looking to achieve?
Is it 99.9% up time?
Is it
they're looking for Office integration
is that they want to turn on the
new features and then once you made
that decision now it's like okay
well, let's go take a look.
Did we look at your data?
Do you have
seven years worth of data in the
system with workflows stuck for seven
years that you don't even know of
Very common right.
Do you have processes that no
longer exists or no longer work?
Do you have archive data?
You never tried to archive it.
You don't need it anymore,
but you just don't know what to do with it.
All of that adds into the price that
you're going to pay per usage in the Cloud.
So at the retail price of $40
per gig per month,
you want to be very detailed intensive
when it comes to looking at those items
so that you can archive off the data
so you can focus on the business
processes and really determine if
you want to bring it forward with
a data migration process as what
would be available through fast track.
Or do you want to start new out of the box?
And I would tell you probably 40% of
customers are looking at a brand new
out of the box net new installation
just because things like the people
that wrote the system are no longer there.
They may not have their partner anymore.
The people who had the business
knowledge of those things,
It's changed over time and now
that process doesn't work for them.
What about code?
You know,
managing code managing customizations
is expensive over time.
If you wrote customizations back
in 2011 to hide forms or tabs
and you wrote JavaScript,
you can do that out of the box now.
So why would you want to bring over
any of that leftover baggage into
your brand new environment? So it
gives you an opportunity to clean
a lot of that up as well as help
reinvent the business process and
a lot of people get confused in -
you know, should I do a data migration?
Should I migrate or you know best practices
not to implement new technologies?
And really, if depending on the
size of scale that you are,
these tools allow you to have that
capability, roll the data into the sandbox,
take a look at new forms, new revisions.
Especially with UCI, you're going to
have to update your ear forms, right?
If you have any third party ISVs they
may have changed the way they worked.
Some of the Microsoft things
have changed, business processes.
All those kind of things have changed.
You can actually add in some change there.
Now are you looking to do a
whole redeployment? Probably not.
There's probably some fields and forms and
data that's still going to be the same,
and that will allow you to move forward,
but certainly by dealing with some
of these things on-prem and having
those conversations before you
move online is going to help make
that Cloud migration much easier.
And would you say there are any other
challenges today that folks
are facing in general?
Yeah, I mean I think when you look
at it that one of the biggest
questions is licensing, right?
How am I gonna deal with the licensing?
How many licenses do I need?
Am I on a team member license?
Do I use a Power app license am
I really consuming Dynamics?
Can I use a portal?
There's so many different things that
you can talk about and that's
also why you know,
we recommend the partners involved
to help you through that task
The data migration is only a small
piece of what you're doing, right?
If I look at it as -
That's the forklift of migrating the
data from the work behind the scenes,
so to speak
when it comes to all the different
steps to move you from the current
version you're on to the latest version,
but once you get there,
there's another whole set of
steps that have to happen.
Sure,
Training's a big one.
You know,
going through understanding what's
changed you haven't, 2011 to 9?
There's some significant changes, right?
The Navbars have changed the
apps model's different.
You know,
you may be able to even build some
Power apps and some other capabilities
that would lead to more productivity.
Help you return to revenue faster
by using some of those capabilities
like congruentX provides.
That would help you.
So that's a great pivot, Chris.
What would you say are some of
the things you know based on your
experience and that you've seen the
product overview over the years,
What would you say are the biggest
changes that have happened recently
to make the migration smoother,
faster, less stressful for customers?
Wow,
I mean me and you were talking
about this a couple of days ago and
I'll tell you it's night and day
difference in the data migration process.
So to give you an example,
we would have to go look
at a customer's environment.
Find out how many custom entities they have,
how much data they have,
how many rows in each entity,
what fields are required,
what fields aren't required and
then rebuild that schema over in
online and then write maps to move
each one of those entities over.
You would do that for a normal size system.
You're looking at a 2 to 300 hour
sizing of effort to move that data over,
so that's the first big change
by going to fast track,
you no longer have to migrate the data.
You're actually using ability to
pick up your database inside of the
Microsoft inside of your on-premise.
Upload it through a very secure,
detailed process that Microsoft goes through.
Basically ensures it's cleanse.
Ensure it matches the environment,
runs through a whole bunch of
data integrity checks,
and brings it into a sandbox mode
without having to write anything.
That is a huge time savings,
not only the time it takes to develop
and get all those 200 scripts written,
but also the fact to know that your data
stayed the same and this is the second point.
So a lot of people who
pitch the out of the box or not the
out of the box way but the older migration
path using a kingswaysoft or ascribe
or even even Azure Data Factory
to move data they don't understand
the inter dynamics of the data.
What I mean by that is some
people have reports, for example,
that are based on the date that records
have been created so created on date,
modified date, who's the last
person that used it?
Well if you write scripts to migrate
that data all over all of those
fields have to be considered.
Those timestamps when that record
was created has to be overwritten.
In the past, you aren't even able to do that.
Now you have the capabilities to
overwrite some of those fields.
Yeah, for sure,
what would you say so you know
things are easier to it's easier
to migrate now right?
But every migration is different.
No
two companies are the same instances
or the same customizations you know,
every time you're going to migrate,
it's always going to be a unique experience.
What would you recommend to customers
in thinking about
How should they ensure that
their
journey is successful?
Yeah, I mean there's a few
things I've already mentioned,
but to clarify,
I think the first thing you need
to understand is you need to have
both your business and your IT groups
aligned in making this shift together.
That's the first thing. The second
thing is understanding
what are the things you can
accomplish with this move?
If you just migrating because you want
to get online and get the new features,
that may be your answer,
and that's OK, right?
But I can promise you that
you will not just migrate,
there will be changes that
you have to make to your UI.
There will be older functions
and pieces that don't work
There will be ISVs that you may have added
over time that you no longer need.
Or do you have to update?
So there definitely will be considerations
that have to be made along that time period.
The other thing is,
a lot of people do all this work
and forget about the user training.
You got to have user training.
You gotta be able to.
One of the things that we do
is we record the training.
So once we have those adoption
sessions with the customers in the
different departments to determine
what's best practice for them,
what are they trying to solve,
what fields they need to screen anymore,
What doesn't work?
All those little adoption "gotchas"
we try to clean them up in
their own UCI apps for them,
and then once they get to the
production system they're much happy.
But we also video record
those training sessions
so not only them but new people
coming on board can get that
same training right away.
So it's a great way to get
your use cases in order.
There's a lot of things you can clean
here and get a better experience
not only for today but for future
upgrades. When you move to the Cloud,
you're going to start seeing upgrades
happen twice a year that you're
going to have to be a part of,
and then there's lots of little
preview features that are coming in
and out depending on what pieces of
the Power Platform you're using.
So you gotta plan and be aware
for all of these things.
Yeah,
so definitely greater consistency
across updates, right?
Absolutely,
You can find Chris at congruentX.com or via
the Microsoft MVP site mvp.wards,
that's WARDS.
Thanks so much for joining us today, Chris.
Hey Tom, thanks for being there.
You also can follow me on Twitter
at @CCognetta and you'll see me
at many of the events talking as
well as in the new forums that
we've set up here for Microsoft.
I'll be right in the data migration,
helping answer questions and help
everybody in the community get online.
Look forward to it. Thank you Tom.
Appreciate the time.
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