MSCRM 2011 - Going into the Cloud Considerations

In CRM 4.0 there were some major limitations if you decided to go into the cloud with CRM Online (vs. On Premise) that required careful consideration. A good detailed comparison can be viewed here.

However, from a practical point of view, the following were the most significant high level limitations:

• Reporting - custom reports are limited to out of the box views, the report wizard or you could create with significantly greater difficulty some aspx type reporting using FetchXML

• Plugins - no ability to add custom extensions to the application

The good news is that CRM 2011 Online has overcome these limitations to a large extent. However not completely:

• Reporting - custom reports can now be created using a FetchXML extension to BIDS. You can find a good introduction of this capability here. While this does provide a good workaround solution it should be mentioned that you are still limited to the FetchXML framework. That is you can only retrieve data from CRM in ways that FetchXML will allow you to. FetchXML was limited to relatively simple queries in 4.0 and the good news is that it's been expanded to be able to include aggregate functions such as GROUP BY which are important when it comes to reporting. However FetchXML is still bound to be more restrictive than it's SQL counterpart - the latter can be manipulated in virtually limitless ways, if not by a SQL statement, then by employing the use of cursors, dynamic SQL etc. to achieve the desired result set. 

• Workflow plugins - while standard "trigger" plugins can now be added to the CRM 2011 Online deployment, you are still unable to deploy workflow plugins. A "trigger" plugin is executed synchronously or asynchronously as a direct result of an event (update, insert, delete) that is made to an entity (for example, good for validation, calculation etc. logic). A workflow plugin is executed by the workflow engine which is useful if an advanced function needs to be called as a result of a more protracted workflow that gets generated due to some condition in the environment. Although through some fancy footwork it should be possible to leverage the "trigger" plugin to work around this limitation (for example, creating a custom entity that gets updated by the workflow and "trigger" plugins are designed against inserts to the custom entity - just theorizing)

In summary, while the workflow plugin limitation is not optimal I do believe it can be worked around. However if your organization has complex reporting (read: above average) or if you are upgrading an existing installation where reports have employed dynamic/advanced reporting techniques or need to join to data that sits outside of the CRM database, then you may want to give this further consideration before moving into the cloud.

One final point, if you are upgrading your existing on premise installation and you have many custom reports that have been written, you'll need to consider the effort that it will take converting those to the FetchXML cloud model equivalent.