Importing Customizations in CRM 2011

My previous post dealt with approaches for exporting  customizations from CRM.  Importing the customizations has also changed a little.

In CRM 4.0, the export file was self contained and it could be imported from anywhere. You also had the ability of importing zip as well as xml files. When you imported files such as the Site Map and ISV.config files, the changes took effect immediately.

In CRM 2011, the exported zip contains some additional files such as those shown below:

The only file you want to be editing is the "customizations" file. Once you have finished making your edits (e.g. Site Map modifications) you'll need to zip up the parent folder (SiteMap_0_1 as shown in the screenshot above) and import the zip file as shown below:

Finally, note that unlike 4.0, you'll need to publish for ALL imports before the changes will take effect.