How to maintain managed solution in CRM

Solutions are how customizers and developers author, package, and maintain units of software that extend Microsoft Dynamics CRM

 

There are two types of Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions: managed and unmanaged. A managed solution is a completed solution that is intended to be distributed and installed. An unmanaged solution is one that is still under development or isn’t intended to be distributed. When the unmanaged solution is complete and you want to distribute it, export it and package it as a managed solution.

 

Before we release managed solution to another environment, we need to consider how to maintain it. If already managed solution is installed, if there is any update in the solution components then uninstalling and reinstalling a managed solution is not a good option when solution contains entities or attributes. This is because data will be lost when entities are deleted.

 

The preferred way to address above problem, is to release a new version of your managed solution.In original unmanaged source solution, make necessary changes and increase the version number of the solution before packaging it as a managed solution.

 

When the organizations that use your solution install the new version, their capabilities will be upgraded to include your changes. If you want to go back to the behavior in a previous version, simply re-install the previous version. This overwrites any solution components with the definitions from the previous version but does not remove solution components added in the newer version.

 

During the installation of previous version of a solution CRM will confirm that the person installing prevoius version wants to proceed.

Note: It is good practice to take back up of each version of managed solution, so we can revert any version of the solution at any point of time.