I had an issue with a vendor recently that I was working with and they no longer supported CRM because they were no longer available. So, in my case the vendor did not happen to have a solution of the product for Dynamics 365. This made it difficult to export and import system customizations into my Dynamics 365 development server for upgrade staging.
I decided to try the version that I did have available (i had luckily archived) for version CRM 2011. However, after attempting to import the solution I was presented with this lovely screen.
And there it was… “you can only import solutions with a package version of 8.2 or earlier into this organization“. So another issue that I had was that this was a managed solution.
My first option involved downloading and creating all the missing resource files that came from the solution. I then updated my CRM publisher when adding the resources into a new solution so the files could be named exactly as they appeared in the old solution file. This all was going well until I realized that there were special ribbon options that were required, other relationships for the entities, and more I would need to fabricate in order to solve this issue. At this point, I knew that there had to be an easier way.
Solution
So when solution files are created in Microsoft Dynamics CRM it stamps the version number that is used to determine when the imports are compatible or not. Microsoft provides the following version compatibility chart as well that further tells me what I am doing is most likely unsupported.
You will be able to import most solutions I found by augmenting the solution file and the Import/Export version node of the solution file, and this appears to work for managed and unmanaged solutions as well.
This is how it is done.
1.) Export your solution from CRM 2011 environment (or if you already have a managed package create a copy of it)
2.) Use WinRar – (or another archiving tool) to open the solution package.
3.) Copy the solution.xml file out of solution file. Chances are it will read something like the following below if it is CRM 2011
<ImportExportXml version=”5.0.9690.4150″ minimumversion=”5.0″ languagecode=”1033″ generatedBy=”OnPremise” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”>
4.) Replace the top line of the solution.xml with an updated version like the following below.
<ImportExportXml version=”7.0.0000.4013″ SolutionPackageVersion=”7.0″ languagecode=”1033″ generatedBy=”OnPremise” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”>
5.) Copy the solution.xml file back into the copy of the solution you made.
Since this is not a supported procedure you will want to test this by then uploading the solution into our CRM development or test environment first before moving it into a production solution.
That is all there is to it.
This solution worked for my situation and I was able to import the solution and continue on.