CRM Live Purge

So you've successfully conducted your Dynamics Sure Step Proof of Concept and your customer has decided to pull the trigger and implement CRM. Congratulations. You now quickly transition into implementation mode and the first step you need to do is purge your pilot data from your CRM environment. Or... you've successfully migrated your CRM data but you discover through testing that some data was deficient and you need to purge and reimport. Whatever the scenario your requirement right now is that you need to purge your data.

What is the best way of going about this in a CRM Live environment?

Well, technically this post does not only cover CRM Online - it can address purging in any CRM environment. However the reason why I'm addressing the CRM Live environment is because you can of course only purge data via the front end, 3rd party tool (e.g. Scribe) or using some programmatic solution that leverages the CRM APIs.

... And of course you should be doing the same in any environment, but let's just say that pragmatism sometimes sets in. For example, the size of the data makes the purge exercise a very slow one. So while I'm not going to go into it there of course "unsupported" ways of purging a CRM database in an on premise environment that are a thousand times more efficient than going via the API.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand - how do we go about purging? There are a number of ways:

1. Programmatic - Create a small .Net application. This should be pretty straight forward but requires a coded solution and you could run into problems with timeouts for large data sets.
2. 3rd Party e.g. Scribe - Build DTS's to purge the data. Again quite straight forward but assumes you have access to such a tool
3. Front end - you can of course use CRM's front end. However going from entity view to entity view and deleting that way would be highly inefficient both because you are limited to 250 rows per deletion and because you'd need to remember to repeat the same steps each time - assuming you need to purge more than once. So a more efficient way is to use the Bulk Record Deletion Tool. The remainder of this post will discuss using the Bulk Record Deletion as a purge tool.

The benefit of using the Bulk Record Deletion tool is that it essentially documents the steps required for the purge and it can subsequently easily be re-used to perform subsequent data purges. Below are the steps required to facilitate this:

Use the Bulk Deletion Wizard to delete all records from the entity in question (or you can limit this to a subset of records you wish to purge by filtering appropriately). Repeat for each entity you wish to purge.

Name the job appropriately and set a recurrence for 365 days. If you do not set a recurrence you will not be able to reuse the job at a later point in time so this is set only to facilitate reuse.

Now all your purge jobs will appear under the "Recurring Bulk Deletion System Jobs" and when you want to re-run the purge you can highlight all your purge jobs and select More Actions | Modify Recurrence to re-run the jobs immediately.

NB: It goes without saying that you need to create a very conspicuous reminder to cancel your purge jobs once you have cutover to production or else you might be in for a nasty surprise down the line... Use responsibly and at your own discretion.