BizTalk CRM Dynamics 4 to Dynamics 2011

Question

My client is doing an upgrade from CRM Dynamics 4 to 2011 and it uses BizTalk 2009 as its ESB, they are currently using the 'Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0' for the Integration, my question is does anyone know what breaking changes are involved from a BizTalk point of view when this upgrade takes places?

Am I looking at a whole new set of contracts in CRM 11 eg WCF meaning code changes, mappings, schemas and moving away from the Adapter (4.) to pure WCF transport communication?

At this moment in time I'm trying to gauge the complexity and migration levels for one service...

Cheers

Answer 1

I have some first hand experience integrating BizTalk with CRM Online 2011.

The major difference is the change from the pre-defined CRM types, allowing compile-time type safety, to an un-typed Wcf interface. A couple of (ugly) solutions to this problem have been documented around the web, but this blog post by Richard Seroter defines a BizTalk-only solution.

We used a third-party supplied adapter , developed by Roedl in Germany. This uses the Wcf Adapter Framework, in a similar manner to the WCF-SQL adapter, to provide a set of compile-time strong-typed schemas. This made it simple to map to and from the CRM types to our legacy system data types.

One disclaimer, we found that performance was "sufficient", without being outstanding. If you need to move a LOT of data back and forth, consider using the bespoke solution, but if lower development cost is your prime motivation, it is worth considering.

Answer 2

The scope of this project as described will be huge especially considering the limitations of the BizTalk Server Adapter. Have they considered using Scribe? You might want to do a simple proof of concept project for them with the free evaluation version. Scribe downloads