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10 Headaches With On-Premises Dynamics CRM

Justin Languirand

Jul 20 2022

3 min read

You love your Dynamics CRM 2016 system. Memories of that disastrous upgrade from 2013 have faded, and users have been keeping adoption rates really high. Why would you want to change things and move to the cloud with Dynamics 365? Licensing has been affordable, and even the pandemic hasn’t really affected your Dynamics usage. If anything, it has been more utilized. But standing still is not progress when the world is moving forward around you. Soon you will be left behind with connectivity, BI, AI, Machine Learning, and all of the other new techy buzzwords that are emerging (those are all real on the Dynamics 365 platform BTW).

Well, if being left behind is not enough to motivate you, maybe you can recall some of these headaches?

You’ve had to restart Windows Server 2012 a few times last month. Users are frustrated with the downtime it caused.
Outlook Add-in throws a 401 error whenever you provision a new laptop for users.
Your SSL certificate just expired but you didn’t realize. Your company is down for 5 hours until the new cert can be applied.
It took 3 months on the phone with Microsoft to get Dynamics on-premises and SharePoint on-premises connected.
Portal forms would be great for your customers and greatly improve their support experience. However, there is no such luck with on-premises.
Microsoft Flow would tie your approval processes together, but it cannot connect to your Dynamics Instance.
Microsoft licensing covers your cloud environment, but you are still paying for servers.
You just replaced the SSL cert last Tuesday, but forgot to update the trust with Exchange Online. All of your Customers didn’t get their emails last week.
An on-premises upgrade to v9 would be fine, but you just realized they require the latest server OS and your hardware won’t support it.
An angry ex-employee deleted all open opportunities. Too bad that your database backups have been failing for the last month.

Migrating to Dynamics 365 CRM alleviates them all.

The integration with Exchange Online just works. Plain and simple, there is no fighting with it. Same thing goes with the SharePoint document integration. Microsoft handles all of the upgrades. Microsoft is continually enhancing and growing the platform. They handle all of the security with respect to data centers. Microsoft’s hosted offering has protection that a typical on-premises data center can’t possible match. A breach or any reported issue is a big issue for any Microsoft hosted service, so they do anything possible to prevent them from occurring. They promise and really come through on their uptime availability promise. Backups are automatic, and you don’t have to even think about them. Need to refresh a stale sandbox environment? It is very easy to manage.

So how do you migrate to Dynamics 365 CRM? I will have a separate article to discuss that very topic.

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About the Author

Justin Languirand

Solution Architect with a focus on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Data Integration (Scribe), Microsoft Dynamics GP, SQL Server, SSRS, SSIS, Jitterbit. Justin works with clients to transform data into information they use to run their businesses.