Our latest addition to the Synchronicity Echo managed service addresses an issue which (whether you use Echo or not) can affect the outcome of a data migration in unexpected ways. Within Dynamics 365, Microsoft have included many default cascading behaviors. For example, if you update the owner of an account record, any activities associated with that account will be updated with the same owner. This can prove to be a nightmare to troubleshoot, regardless of what order you migrate your data in. The outcome is often difficult to track down and is often only discovered long after the migration (when it's too late to make bulk updates in a meaningful way).
Having faced this issue in the past, and having asked our customers or partners to take care of the cascading behaviors, the team at Synchronicity decided to include a process within the Echo Managed Service to address this. The new process takes a copy of the relationships (to be re-instated later), and then assigns every relationship that is configurable (often more than 4,000 relationships) non-cascading. In this way, we can safely migrate the data in any order, without the consequence of having missed an unexpected cascade!
For more information on this, or any part of the Echo Managed Service, contact us on info@synchronicity-systems.com.