Development and Production environments?

[Keithj42]

Greetings,

Do most folks use a development and a production environment for CRM4?
It doesn't seem like there's a very easy way to move changes from one
server to another. My concern with all the export/import options, is
missing something when I do a major configuration change. How do
others handle this?

[Peter Hale]

How we always do it - and is the only supported way

Be very careful (as you should always be and make sure you have a full
export of the Production Server customizations and if really major changes -
a Database backup as well ) - and always take "all customizations" if
possible - be very careful taking custom entities if you don't take "all".

Pete

Post by Keithj42
Greetings,
Do most folks use a development and a production environment for CRM4?
It doesn't seem like there's a very easy way to move changes from one
server to another. My concern with all the export/import options, is
missing something when I do a major configuration change. How do
others handle this?

[David Vidmar]

I use development and production environments and I believe this is the way
to go.

As Peter suggested, it's easiest to allways export all customizations, but
it's not always wise to do that. If more than one person is working on same
organization this is surely not possible.

Couple of obvious traps you should try to avoid:

If you make changes to production environment only, and later transfer
changes from development enviromnet you will probably loose changes you did
on production only.

Be aware that when you remove a field on development environment and then
transfer changes to production, the field will not be remove. All changes are
additive-only!

Cheers, David

Post by Keithj42
Greetings,
Do most folks use a development and a production environment for CRM4?
It doesn't seem like there's a very easy way to move changes from one
server to another. My concern with all the export/import options, is
missing something when I do a major configuration change. How do
others handle this?
.