Workflow Plugin CRM Online Compatibility

There are a lot of useful free add-ons available for Dynamics CRM that can add some serious customization features. The issue in many cases is that these add-ons were only released for the on-premise version of CRM.

For example, take the very useful CRM Manipulation Library which contain some important calculation capabilities. I especially find the Date Utilities to come in handy as there is often a requirement to calculate an off-set of days or business days as part of workflow logic. But when you try import the solution into a CRM Online instance you will receive an error that looks something like the following:

The good news is that this can be made compatible with CRM Online by following these steps:

1. Unzip the solution into a folder
2. Open the customizations.xml file
3. Perform a search for the IsolationMode node
4. Change IsolationMode value from 1 to 2
5. Update the original zip file with the modified file

Once you have done so you should be able to import it into CRM Online. Applying this trick does not necessarily mean that the plugin will work as it might fail on something when trying to execute. However it also just may function without a problem which is indeed the case with the CRM Manipulation Library. So it's definitely worth a shot. If your plugin does not work after performing this tweak, you'll have to do some debugging at the code level.