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Using SCRIBE Online To Migrate From CRM 4.0 to Dynamics 365

Recently I had a client that needed to be migrated from CRM 4.0 on-premise to Dynamics 365 online.  First, I want to say that we opted to not do the upgrade to CRM 2011 on-premise to CRM 2013 on-premise to CRM 2015 on-premise to Dynamics 365 on-premise because the client wanted to start fresh with CRM customization's.  So personally, it would have been a waste of time to do that upgrade process.

The following issues where identified with the data migration:
1) CRM 4.0 is no supported by SCRIBE Online.
2) The server OS that CRM 4.0 and SQL Server ran on was not supported.
3) The version of SQL Server was no supported.

How am I going to migrate this data? Hmm.....

The solutions:
1) The RDP Terminal Server I am using has a supported server OS.
2) I am able to connect to SQL Server CRM 4.0 Database with ODBC.
3) Install SCRIBE On-Premise Agent on the Terminal Server and use the ODBC connector to retrieve the data.

By using the ODBC connector I could access the data in SCRIBE Online in a supported way.  Because of this approach the migration did run a little slower because I couldn't run multiple maps at the same time over the same ODBC connection, because it would throw a connection error.

One piece I was not able to migrate with SCRIBE Online was the attachments stored in CRM 4.0, which was about 80 GB worth.  I couldn't migrate these because of changes in how CRM stored them.  So to accomplish this I did the following:

1)  I downloaded this tools source code from GitHub.
2) I modified it to read a list of guids.
3) I exported a list of attachment guids to csv.
4) I modified the application to then download attachments and put them into one root folder and have subsequent folders in the root.  Each subsequent folder was a guid and inside that folder was the attachment.
4) I then use the Microsoft Dynamics 365 SDK to create a console application to upload the attachments to Dynamics 365 and re-link them to the parent record.

Once I made the code changes and wrote the application I the download and upload ran overnight.


Know you might be asking yourself, "How did you store 80 GB of attachments in CRM online?  Isn't that expensive?"  I will be posting a separate blog on that in my Dynamics 365 blog.
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