If you work for a Microsoft Partner and use Dynamics CRM or CRM Online, the current Internal Use Rights (IUR) program is changing. I recently spent some time planning for these changes in my organization, and I’d like to detail these experiences so other partners can save some time and headache moving to the new IUR program.
Microsoft announced the changes to the IUR program a few months ago, so I won’t cover the details of those changes. More information can be found here (you will need login credentials to PartnerSource to access the page):
https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/northamerica/news-events/news/msdcrmiurdisclosureofupcomingchanges
The preparation for the new IUR program is to have a migration plan in place prior to signing up for this new program, so you can be assured your users will be migrated successfully to the new plan. For myself, all this meant was to verify our tenant was upgraded from Commerce Transaction Platform (CTP) to Office 365 (which it was previously), and then check that the new program had enough CRM licenses to handle the number of users my organization had in our current system. Since we are a Dynamics CRM Gold partner, we receive 80 CRM Online licenses (down from the 250 in the retiring IUR program). Fortunately, the number of users we have in our current CRM system is below 80, so all I had to do was sign up for the new program and migrate over the users.
The instructions I received from Microsoft were very detailed and were easy to follow, so I proceeded to step through them. The starting point was to login to the Partner Digital Download site and navigate to the Microsoft Online Services tab:
This area displays the product keys that can be used to redeem for the IUR benefits that my organization is eligible for:
Once I clicked the link to redeem, I was taken to our Office 365 administrative panel where I logged in and followed the steps to redeem using the eligible product key token. The webpage then gives you an opportunity to purchase additional licenses but I didn’t need to do that.
At this point I was able to see the new IUR subscription listed in our Office 365 admin panel, alongside the IUR program that is being retired. The next step I took was to migrate the CRM licenses for the users to the new IUR program. I did that and verified in CRM that users with licenses in this new IUR program were listed as enabled users, while users that didn’t have a license were listed as disabled users in CRM.
There was only one issue I experienced when performing these steps and it really threw me for a loop, as it affected our CRM users in our production environment. We purchase additional storage space for our CRM Online environment, as the size of our database is larger than the 5GB provided when you provision a CRM environment.
When I completed the steps of signing up for the new IUR program and migrating the CRM user licenses, I began receiving messages that our production CRM environment has run out of space and that users cannot add records. This puzzled me and when I went to the Resources In Use screen (in Settings) I saw that our instance was only allocated the initial 5GB of space:
I went back into Office 365 to verify that we were still purchasing the additional space for CRM and when I verified that, I felt it was time to bring in Microsoft Support to help.
In Microsoft’s defense, I usually have a good experience when reaching out to their support teams for help, but this issue was such a strange one that I think Microsoft was unclear how to help me resolve it. I won’t bore you with the details of each support team I talked to (I spoke with more than a few) but the bottom line is that the support team I spoke with that was able to help me was the Billing Support team. Let me repeat this for emphasis: Microsoft Billing was able to resolve a production-level technical problem I had.
As it turns out, if you previously purchased additional space for your CRM system (like we did), signing up for the new CRM IUR program somehow doesn’t automatically move your additional space purchase to the program, and thereby the CRM system doesn’t recognize that you are already paying for that additional storage space. MS Billing was able to provide me with a one-time signup web page that allowed me to request additional storage space that the new CRM IUR program does recognize, so once I did that our CRM environment recognized the additional space I purchased.
I hope this post helps if other partners experience issues migrating to the new IUR program, and also to show that Microsoft Support has a lot of great people that are dedicated to help partners solve their problems.