EDIT: Before migrating ClickDimensions records, you should already have migrated contacts and marketinglists, as these records are required by some of the entities from ClickDimensions.
I was tasked with migrating a ClickDimensions solution from one Dynamics 365 to another Dynamics365 (both version 9.0). The only differences were, that it was a different CRM tenant and a newer version of ClickDimensions (v9.4.0 – the old was v9.2.0).
Before starting a migration, which has quite a lot of entities and data, I prefer to make a game plan, and determine how I want to attack the task at hand – and that is where I started here as well.
Due to the amount of entities and relationships in between the different areas of ClickDimensions, I reached out to their support-team, to ask them about a migration-order, so all the entities were migrated correctly with their respective links. I am aware, that I can migrate all the records without unique identifier and update all those fields in a secondary migration after all the records have been created, but I wanted a one-shot migration for this, as there is a lot of data.
When I asked ClickDimensions for the correct migration order, they weren’t able to help me, as they had never been asked that question before – a bit odd. However, after several tries, escalations and support staff-members, we received a correct order for the migration, to minimize the relationship issues. When migrating the entities, some of them will throw plugin-errors, and in that case, you just need to disable the plugins mentions in the error message (often in regard to Create). Remember to reactivate the plugins, after you migrated the records!
This is the list I received (with my own comments):
- Systemuser
- Domain (Disable Create plugin)
- Campaign
- Email Template
- Nurture Program (This entity is not present in v9.4 of ClickDimensions)
- Email Send
- Sent Email
- Email Event
- Excluded Email
- Bulk Text Message
- IP Organization
- Anonymous Visitor
- ClickDimensions Import
- Import Log
- Filter (Disable Create plugin)
- Form Field
- Profile
- Form Capture (Disable Create plugin)
- Form Capture Field (Disable Create plugin)
- Event
- Event Participation
- Option Mapping (This entity is not present in v9.4 of ClickDimensions)
- Setting
- Subscription List
- Web Content
- Visit
- Page View
- Unsubscribe
- Send ClickDimensions Email
- Posted Subscription
- Posted Survey
- Run Nurture (This entity is not present in v9.4 of ClickDimensions)
- Posted Form
- Posted Field
- Subscription Preference
- Survey Question
- Survey Answer
- Text Message
This is the package I made for the migration – it is pretty straight forward, as it just migrates each entity one at a time.
It can be a long migration, depending on how old the ClickDimension installation is. Entities like visitor and page view can have A LOT of records. But following the list above, should make it rather painless.
This was a help getting familiar with the process so thank you. The sent email is dependent on contacts being available so did you need to also have contacts migrated? Other CRM entities required include Campaigns and marketing list
Yes, the contacts were also needed to be migrated – I forgot to mention that 🙂
Before I started the migration of clickdimensions, I migrated the standard CRM data.
Can you share with us the SSIS package?
Hi Thomas, thanks for the article. Migration target was with same clickdimensions id (licence)? How you handle web content that is stored in a cloud and is unique for every installation? As is written in documentation – you shouldn’t migrate web content (and few other entities) but recreate on the new instance.
Hi Duchan, I wasnt involved with the data stored in the ClickDimension cloud. I was just brought on for the data transfer specific for Dynamics 365.