Join the force... you must.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Microsoft started his baby steps online with Dynamics CRM 4.0 around 2007 and 2008 and reaching 1 million user mark in July 2009. Since then Microsoft have been acquire new companies like Parature and Adxstudio to improve the portal capabilities, FieldOne for field service management and other small companies to improve online structure and other CRM features. New online development has been done like the Microsoft Marketing, Microsoft Social Engagement and other new features that has been given to us through the version of CRM 2015 and 2016 on which integration of Office 365 will improved by far the reporting power of the online product.

Microsoft time by time is starting do go through a path that all the features you need, you only find online, like for example the Offline capability on mobile, only works with online version and not with on-premises, improvement of Excel features with Power BI online, Microsoft Marketing, Social and Sales are other features that only work online,  all new development have now online focus and not on-premises.

(Image source: http://epicstream.com/features/The-Easy-Way-to-Destroy-the-Death-Star---Funny-Comic)

Is this the Death Star?

In my option No. This is the natural order of the things, more and more the communications are becoming better, Azure and other Online services are better, so this was something that we all were expecting.

What to do with all the clients that have on-premise?

I think for big clients we should start to put a plan in place for migration to prepare the transitions and review code that is deprecated, basically do the same thing as we have done with every single upgrade we have done along the years, from version 4.0 to 2011, to 2013 and now 2016.

But how we going to migrate all the XRM or the evilly CRM extensions we have done?

This is where the plan kicks off, some of the development like tricky reports or other tricky plugins need to be review in order to see if it will work online, bear in mind that we no longer have access to SQL and now the easy route could be a bit more difficult, any way, from my experience working with CRM online and on-premise, everything that you have been develop on-premise is possible to be done online. Maybe in some cases you will need an Azure server to support some proprietary code like a console application running time to time to schedule something, or other functionality you have created outside the CRM with out using any kind of plugin or custom workflow.

So at the end what this means is you will join the force.

Enjoy the movie and Merry Christmas :D