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How difficult is it to move from a Power Apps CDS to D365 Customer Service CDS?

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Posted on by TVlasic

If I create some Power Apps (and the underlying CDS) to take care of some business processes and then later decide to move to a Dynamics 365 application (Customer Service for example), will I end up with two CDS environments? Is there an easy way to add any Power Apps I have previously created to the D365 Environment or will I have to recreate them in the new environment? I thought I read a cryptic note somewhere that You can't "upgrade" a Power Apps to CDS to a D365 CDS but it didn't say what the option was if you already have a PA CDS and then create a D365 CDS.

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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Hamish Sheild 3,005 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @TVlasic ,

I'm pretty sure that there is not a path for you to convert/upgrade your CDS environment to a Dynamics 365 environment. This would be quite a nice feature though and you could put create an Idea for the product team to look into.

You could use a Solution to move your customisations from the CDS environment to the Dynamics 365 environment. At the end of the day they are both just CDS environments but a Dynamics 365 environment has more pre-configured apps within it. The only problem with this is that your data will not be moved to the Dynamics 365 environment with the Solution. You would need to use the Excel Export/Import functionality, dataflow or another method to migrate the data across.

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M I Mostafa 8 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hey,

You can certainly create a solution on your current CDS only instance that includes your current Apps and other components and then deploy it to a Dynamics 365 instance.

However, your current CDS only instance cannot as of today be upgraded to Dynamics 365. The difference here is data. You can migrate your solution and its components to a new Dynamics 365 instance fairly easily but you will have to have a proper data migration exercise to migrate your data from your current CDS instance to the new Dynamics 365 instance.

The "cryptic" note you mention is just saying that you cannot upgrade a CDS instance to become a Dynamics 365 via a click of a button - in which case you would not need to migrate data or even move your solution components. It would be great but it is not available at the moment.

Hope this helps.

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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As @HSheild stated, there are no ways out-of-the-box and you'll have to migrate your configuration and data. You can try lodging a Microsoft Support Request via the Power Platform admin center (https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/support), but I wouldn't get my hopes up. It would depend on the severity/criticality/importance of the environment in question.

Hope this helps!

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David Jennaway 716 on at

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Although CDS and D365 share the same platform, the main D365 apps have dependencies on components that are only installed when a D365 instance is commissioned, and so there is (currently) no way to convert a CDS instance to D365. I think this is unlikely to change, as the dependencies are probably too complex.
So, if you've started with CDS, then want to move to D365, then you would need to migrate across. As per the previous replies, this involves the customisations (relatively easy) and data (maybe less so). Two other things to consider:
It might be viable to keep 2 separate instances; 1 CDS and 1 D365, if there little overlap of data or users between them. If there is some data to share, you could either copy that using Power Automate, or maybe use a virtual entity in one instance to provide a link to data in the other instance. Either of these option are only really viable if the data is read-only in one instance
If you're starting from scratch, and know that you will be moving to D365, it may be best to start with a D365 instance. There will be licensing considerations, but while you're using it only as CDS, then you won't need client licenses for the D365 apps, and can probably work with the D365 Team Member license, though you'll need to check the overall license implications

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