Deploying Dynamics 365 Customizations with ALM Pipelines

Ever spent hours perfecting a Dynamics 365 solution—only to have
it break during deployment? You're not alone. Most of us trip
over the same hidden traps when moving from dev to prod. But
what's actually causing these failures—and how can you package
solutions to avoid them? Stay with me, because we're unpacking
the advanced methods that separate smooth deployments from
disaster.


Why Solution Packaging Breaks Even When It Looks Right


You get the green checkmark in dev and think you're finally in
the clear. Then, you hit test or prod and everything comes apart.
It’s the classic Dynamics 365 story—one that way too many teams
keep replaying. Let’s spell out the real issue: throwing every
customization into your solution package doesn’t guarantee a safe
landing. The “include everything and hope for the best” approach
works fine in tiny, one-person projects. The moment multiple
people get involved, or your business processes start layering
up, things start going off the rails.On paper, Dynamics 365
solutions look straightforward. You group up your plug-ins,
flows, entities, all the bits and pieces you’ve built. You check
those reassuring green checks, maybe run a basic validation, and
then hit export with a sense of accomplishment. But a lot of the
real work isn’t visible until you place that solution inside
another environment. Test or prod looks and behaves differently
than dev, and suddenly functions you took for granted start
breaking down. One of the most frustrating cases: spending a day
tweaking a plug-in—deploying, re-registering, testing in dev—and
then watching it quietly disappear as soon as you import your
solution to a higher environment. The same can happen with
business rules. If layering isn’t done right, those critical
rules can get swallowed up, leaving users in prod with a version
of Dynamics that behaves nothing like what you signed off on in
dev.A major headache comes from dependencies you can’t always
see. You might think that ‘Add Existing’ button pulled in
everything you needed, but Dynamics does a pretty lousy job
surfacing what lives underneath the surface. Let’s say you build
a slick sales process flow that links to a custom entity. If you
don’t package up that referenced entity, you’ll watch the flow
break down in prod, even though it sailed through dev perfectly.
One study found that nearly half—47%, to be exact—of failed
Dynamics 365 deployments come down to overlooked dependencies or
confusion about solution types. It’s not just developers falling
into this trap. Admins and functional consultants working with
apps, automations, even simple field changes, hit the same
walls.You also see a whole lot of confusion about managed and
unmanaged solutions, and that’s a bigger deal than most teams
realize. It’s easy to assume you can just “fix it later” if
something gets overwritten, but unmanaged imports love to wipe
out previous work. A plug-in you registered, a web resource you
customized, or a view you spent hours designing can all vanish.
Even worse, sometimes you get orphaned components without version
tracking, which means you’re left hunting for ghosted rules or
flows that have no clear owner.A problem that gets less
attention, but causes plenty of trouble, is overwrites. Unmanaged
solutions will merge right into whatever’s already there, which
can mean your business logic from dev suddenly replaces whatever
was in prod—whether you wanted that or not. Managed solutions
bring a bit more discipline, but if your team misses the switch
and drops unmanaged content into production, you inherit a
Frankenstein environment. Suddenly, nobody wants to touch
updates, because every change could break something new.Let’s
ground this with a real scenario—because we’ve all lived some
version of this. Imagine rolling out a CRM customization for a
sales team. The business process flow you built uses custom
fields and references a contact entity you assume exists
everywhere. In test, the flow errors out. After hours buried in
logs, you realize the referenced entity never made it onto your
packing list. Now the sales team is down, management is unhappy,
and you’re left unpicking dependencies by hand. It’s hardly a
one-off story.A lot of teams get caught up blaming tools or even
individual mistakes, but the pattern repeats across
companies—tech, finance, healthcare, the works. And honestly,
much of it comes from putting trust in that green check without
spending time digging into how components interact. Even seasoned
Dynamics pros can forget that environments have their own quirks.
Sandbox data, for example, might cover up a missing dependency
you’ll only notice in prod when something fails.There are also
those late-night moments where, despite all your careful
packaging, something important just… isn’t there. Maybe a Power
Automate flow that references an old field or an API key from
dev. Or, the classic case: importing a solution and wiping out
critical business rules because your layer order got scrambled.
This hits even harder if managed and unmanaged solutions are
mixed. Once a customization is lost, you’re often left rebuilding
from scratch or digging through backups.So, what actually
separates smooth deployments from recurring fires? It’s the teams
who don’t treat solution packaging as a checklist item. Instead,
they dig into how every component fits together, what each
dependency means, and how changes will ripple as the solution
moves. Packaging in Dynamics 365 is closer to city planning than
simple file transfer. Missing dependencies, unmanaged chaos, and
careless overwrites pile up fast if you just trust the platform
to handle everything.Done well, the packaging process is about
understanding relationships and moving parts—not just checkboxing
“Add Existing” everywhere. That’s what saves you from deployments
that collapse after a false sense of security. The next logical
step? Mapping out those dependencies before migration, instead of
chasing down missing parts after the fact.


Dependency Nightmares: Mapping Before You Migrate


If you’ve ever watched a progress bar crawl along during a
solution import, only for Dynamics 365 to throw a full page of
red errors at you, you know the pain is real. Nine times out of
ten, those angry messages are shouting about missing
dependencies—fields, tables, flows, or references you forgot
about. It can feel personal, but it’s just Dynamics keeping
strict tabs on relationships you can’t always see on the surface.
People often want to blame a glitch, but almost every failed
import traces back to something not included in the package.What
trips teams up is how invisible these dependencies are until it’s
too late. Let’s say you work on a custom solution with a couple
of plug-ins, some cloud flows, and a new entity or two. On the
surface, your build looks nice and tidy. But there’s a
little-used field somewhere that a Power Automate flow depends
on, or maybe a form script quietly refers to another table that’s
only in your dev environment. It all “just works” when you’re
developing, and no one thinks twice—until you run the import and
hit errors for objects you didn’t even remember existed. You end
up playing Dependency Whack-a-Mole: fix one, and three more pop
up.Complexity multiplies this pain. The bigger and more
customized your Dynamics 365 solution gets, the more tangled that
web becomes. What started as a clean app for one business process
snowballs into dozens of custom connectors, linked flows,
calculated fields, and integrations. When a team changes—people
leave, or a new admin takes over—the knowledge about what
connects to what evaporates fast. People assume that previous
work was neatly packaged up, but assumptions are how production
goes down on a Friday night.Let’s put faces to this. Picture the
developer who spends a day wiring up a custom connector.
Everything tests fine in dev, the solution coolly exports, but in
the test environment that same connector refuses to work. You dig
around, retrace your steps, and finally realize: the connector
needs a reference to a table never included in the exported
solution. It’s not the connector’s fault, it’s not even the
import process—it’s the missing dependency hiding in plain sight.
The sad part is, most of us have a similar story.And it’s not
just huge solutions with hundreds of entities where this goes
wrong. Even a single missed lookup field—maybe something created
weeks ago for a one-off pilot—can crash the whole import. These
aren’t abstract problems. Unmapped dependencies are the single
most common source of solution deployment headaches. Dynamics
doesn't forget what’s linked; it just silently expects you to
connect all the dots yourself.There’s all this advice floating
around about using the Solution Checker and built-in dependency
analysis tools. The reality? Most teams skip them. Deadlines
loom, and the pressure to deliver trumps the urge to double-check
dependencies. Maybe you run it once and skim the output, or you
mean to go back and check later. But that five-minute check you
ignore now will almost certainly cost you hours chasing errors
later. Admins who’ve been burned before know to treat dependency
checks as ritual—right up there with good backups and commenting
your code.The best analogy is a recipe. You can wing it, but
forget a single ingredient and the whole dish turns out wrong.
Before you even think about moving a solution, lay out what’s
inside. List every component, script, table, and referenced
object. If something depends on a field or entity created in
another solution or from a previous version, ask whether that
dependency is included—or if your migration’s about to break in
half. It’s old-fashioned, but diagramming the high points of your
configuration catches things automated tools don’t flag, like a
legacy script somewhere in the form events.Let’s talk about what
this looks like in the wild. There was a finance team juggling
multiple environments and a half-dozen custom workflows. They
finished an upgrade, tried importing the solution into test, and
immediately got errors. The culprit wasn’t a missing entity or a
complex automation—it was a business rule in one form that
referenced a field nobody used anymore. That field wasn’t
included in the solution export, but the business rule still
pointed to it. They spent days peeling apart the logs, rebuilding
forms, and re-importing, all to discover a single oversight. It’s
not glamorous, but it’s the norm.The upshot to all this is pretty
clear. By mapping dependencies up front—and I mean really digging
into what everything touches—you don’t just keep your solution
cleaner. You dodge those middle-of-the-night fire drills when
production goes down, and you give every import a fighting chance
to succeed the first time. It doesn’t matter if you’re building
something small or rolling out a massive CRM overhaul. Dependency
mapping is what lets your customizations cross environments in
one piece.Of course, dependencies set the stage, but the real
drama unfolds when you pick the wrong type of solution for the
wrong environment. That leads us straight into the world of
managed versus unmanaged, where choosing the wrong layer isn’t
just a best practices slip—it’s something that can leave you
untangling your environment for months.


Managed vs. Unmanaged: Getting the Layers Right


Anyone who’s worked with Dynamics 365 for more than a few
projects has been told the same advice: use unmanaged solutions
in development, managed solutions in production. Simple enough,
right? But here’s where it usually breaks down. Teams get
comfortable making changes with unmanaged solutions in dev and
test, then, in the rush to meet a deadline, they export straight
to production without switching over to managed. At first, it
doesn’t look like anything's wrong. You see your updates, your
custom fields show up, maybe even the automations run—just like
you hoped. But under the surface, things start to get messy, and
it builds up fast.In development, unmanaged solutions feel great
because they let you move fast, tweak forms, add new options, and
generally try things out without extra guardrails. It’s the
Dynamics equivalent of having versioning turned off in a shared
OneDrive folder—great for flexibility, lousy for long-term
stability. Once you cross over to production, that same
flexibility starts causing real problems. Suddenly, anyone with
the right level of access can make changes that layer on top of
what’s already there, sometimes in ways that Dynamics never
really intended. Unmanaged solutions don’t lock down your
customizations, so the environment accumulates changes, mistakes,
and quick fixes, all of which stack up directly on top of the
base system.The most common issue isn’t just clutter. It’s
unpredictability. Say you hotfix an entity with a few new fields
to address a ticket that popped up last minute. In unmanaged
mode, you’re changing the base objects—there’s no separation
between what belongs to your solution and what’s just sitting in
the environment. Fast forward a few weeks, and IT decides it’s
time for a new release. Now, nobody can remember which entities
were touched, which flows got rerouted, or what rules need to be
migrated. You’re stuck sifting through audit logs and version
history if you’re lucky. If you’re not, changes get lost, and
hours of work just disappear.Here’s a scenario that’s probably
familiar—a team needs to remove a bunch of custom fields after a
process change. With unmanaged layers, those fields don’t have a
tidy uninstall button. You literally delete them, one by one,
hoping you were thorough. And if you miss something, it sits
there, orphaned or worse, causing problems for downstream apps.
Managed solutions, on the other hand, are a bit stricter. When
you import a managed solution into prod, you get layer
protection. That means you can revert to a previous state, safely
uninstall full chunks of functionality, and, most importantly,
keep your environment clean.One thing people underestimate:
managed solutions also bring in a versioning model. Every import,
every tweak, is tracked, so you know what’s been applied and in
what order. It’s not magic—it’s just structure. But that
structure is exactly what you want in a live environment where
customers and executives expect things to keep working, upgrade
after upgrade. Without it, you end up with overlapping layers of
updates, sometimes with plugins, views, or even whole entities
overwritten silently. It’s how environments get that
“Frankenstein” feeling where nobody’s quite sure what’s running.A
mistake I still see is teams releasing unmanaged solutions
because “that’s how the old project was done.” Maybe someone
thinks it’ll be easier to make hotfixes directly in production.
For a while, it can seem to work. Then comes a big update or a
migration project. The unmanaged layers are now baked into the
environment. You can’t roll back, and uninstall routines don’t
work as expected. Data gets tangled up because the platform
doesn’t always distinguish between temporary tweaks and permanent
changes. Now, instead of clean removals, you’re deep in the weeds
manually untangling what’s safe to delete. A healthcare company
ran into this exact issue when an unmanaged update wiped out some
of their audit tables. The only way out was a complete rollback,
losing days’ worth of transactional data—not something you want
to explain to a compliance team.The fix is rarely retroactive.
You can’t easily convert an unmanaged mess back to a fully
tracked and layered setup. That’s why best practice is so
insistent: always convert to managed before you push to
production. And don’t trust that it’ll work just because it
imported fine elsewhere. Dynamics environments can have subtle
differences—security roles, sample data, field
customizations—that only show up when you run a managed solution
import in a properly matched sandbox. Sandboxing gets ignored
because it feels like another step, but in reality, it’s how you
catch weird layer conflicts before they impact live users.So, if
you want your Dynamics 365 deployment to behave, get your layers
right from the start. Use unmanaged for rapid builds, managed for
stability, and always check imports in a sandbox first. You’ll
spend less time firefighting and more time delivering updates
that land cleanly across the board. That’s great advice for
solutions—but what about all the stuff you can’t put into a
package? There’s a whole other class of settings and data that
trips teams up every cycle. This is where environment-specific
variables, sensitive config, and data migration tools become
critical.


Data, Environmental Variables, and Automation: The Final Hurdles


You finally tick every box for your Dynamics 365
deployment—solutions are packaged, dependencies checked, imports
run with no errors. But when you fire up the app in production,
something just doesn’t work. Flows won’t trigger, dashboards stay
empty, or API calls simply fail. Sound familiar? It’s one of the
most common Dynamics 365 frustrations: you did everything right
with your solution components, so why is the end result so...
broken? The answer, more often than not, comes down to what your
solution package doesn’t actually carry over—environment
variables, connection references, and real business data. For all
the power Dynamics gives you, its packaging model is still mostly
about customizations, not the context they run in.Let’s zoom in
on environment variables and connection references first. These
are the settings that let your solution run differently in dev,
test, and production, but Dynamics treats them as configuration,
not part of the export. So, here’s what catches teams out every
single week: you build a beautiful Power Automate flow, set the
connection string to your dev database, and push the whole thing
to production—without swapping the connection or the variable for
the live system. The flow just sits there, doing nothing, because
it’s still pointing to dev or, worse, it’s failing silently with
a connection error that’s buried in a somewhere-in-the-cloud log.
No alert, no warning—just lost automation and head-scratching at
the next status meeting.It isn’t limited to Power Automate,
either. Connection references also crop up in canvas apps,
integrations, and even plug-ins. Developers get so used to
clicking through their trusted configuration in one environment
that they forget, in production, those settings can (and often
must) change. Fail to update them? The solution appears
functional, but users get errors or blank screens for reasons no
log file in Dynamics is going to explain. Then there’s the risk
of hard-coded config. Copying an environment with a dev API key
into production might sound harmless until you realize those keys
have different permissions, rate limits, and access to sensitive
data. One missed variable, and a flow can accidentally expose or
write back the wrong data. In the worst cases, sensitive data
leaks into public test datasets or old dev records are
accidentally purged.Environment variables are valuable—if you use
them with intention. But setting them wrong is like giving
someone the right key for the wrong door. Maybe your app gets
data from the wrong SharePoint site, or an integration runs in
the wrong region, or secret credentials end up on the wrong
integration. And because environment variables are managed
separately from solution packages, there’s no failsafe—just a
layer of extra work that’s easy to overlook in the rush to go
live. Documenting every variable, mapping out what each value
should be per environment, and treating this as part of the
release, not an afterthought, is what separates reliable
deployments from the ones that create late-night Slack
messages.Now, add data migration to the pile of things that trip
up even experienced teams. When you deploy a Dynamics 365
solution, you’re only moving the customization—the tables,
fields, entities, views, and so on. You’re not taking any lookup
tables, reference data, or business-specific records unless you
explicitly do it with migration tools. It’s like shipping a new
point-of-sale system with no products or customer records—your
environment looks right but is missing the fuel that makes it
run. The classic example is importing a solution that relies on a
set of business rules for certain record types, only to find
those rules don’t function because the lookup records never made
it over. That breaks automations, context-sensitive logic, and
anything that relies on those missing records. Even worse, teams
often realize the data is missing only after users begin
reporting errors or missing options, meaning downtime for real
work.Best practice here is to always use a configuration
migration tool alongside your solution import. You get a file
with all your reference data, which you move to each environment
in the right order: first the solution, then the config data. If
you skip this step, you find out the hard way, sometimes only
when a key workflow throws an error because it can’t find a
lookup value. Documentation matters too—tracking which records
must exist, what values should be set in each environment, and
how to map data between different systems. It feels tedious but
is one of the only ways to avoid going live with half a
solution.There’s also a timing factor. Automation in Dynamics
deployment isn’t just “set it and forget it” pipelines. Order
matters. You import your solution at the right stage, configure
your environment variables while referencing the appropriate
settings doc, and only then begin the migration of data. Skip the
order, and you risk running automations on half-configured
systems or populating references before entities are set up.When
you handle variables, data, and automation like first-class
citizens—on the checklist, every time—you see fewer issues and
more reliable rollouts. Dynamics 365 isn’t looking out for missed
settings or absent data. That’s on the deployment team, and even
the best-built solution falls apart if those final hurdles aren’t
cleared. And it’s usually not until you hit the wall once or
twice that the lesson sticks—these “invisible” steps end up being
just as critical as anything you package inside your solution.
So, the hard truth is, if you want your deployments to work
outside dev, every automation, variable, and data point deserves
a seat at the table. Teams that get this down stop treating
deployment as a single step and start treating it as the sequence
it really is: import, configure, migrate, then validate. The ones
who don’t? They’re already scheduling that next late-night
troubleshooting call.


Conclusion


If your Dynamics 365 deployments keep falling apart, it’s
probably not just bad luck. Most failures come from not tackling
the gaps between your solution package and a truly
production-ready environment. Treat every deployment as a living
system—map out those dependencies, pay careful attention to your
layering strategy, and automate only when you know every step is
covered. It isn’t magic or advanced theory; it’s solid
groundwork. If something in this process saved you from a future
middle-of-the-night chaos session, hit subscribe, stick around,
and drop your own deployment disaster (or success) story in the
comments so we can all learn.


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