crm 2011 making changes to a managed solution entity

we are currently working on a specific CRM de开发者_如何学Pythonvelopment. As part of this development we are working with a different supplier who have provided us with a 'core' managed solution, a toolkit of sorts. This toolkit contains a number of entities/web resources etc but crucially contains the case and contact (renamed to customer) entities. As part of our development we need to extend these entities by adding attributes/amending form layout etc for both these entities. should i create a new unmanaged solution - select add existing - choose the customer entity. I can then make my changes (new attributes, form layout changes etc) I then publish my unmanaged solution as a managed solution to import into a UAT/Prod environment. Would this approach work ok?

What if the supplier make changes to their core entity and provide us with an updated release? what happens then or what should i do? There are a couple of attributes (title and ethnicity) that are part of their entity but i need to work of global option sets so i have create 2 new attributes and these are displayed on the form in place of their's. I have not removed theirs but could this cause issues?

any help appreciated chris

You are right on in the first paragraph, you would need to create a new solution and amend their entities. When you import their changes it will add on any additions to those entities. Importing customizations should never remove anything, you have to do that manually. Although unlikely, it is possible that the vendor may release a new version that requires you to roll back your customizations and reinstall it. In this instance you would need to come up with an upgrade plan and take into account all of the dependencies of the system.

I would imagine that those attributes would be dependencies of their managed solution and suspect that CRM won't let you delete them. If you are able to delete the fields and recreate them using global option sets there should be no issues so long as you use the same picklist integer values and schema names for the fields. Microsoft CRM basically copies all of the global option set values to the entity that you put them on so externally there is no difference between the standard and global option sets. Obviously a future upgrade by the vendor may force you to delete it all and recreate everything again manually (or via code using the CRM web services), but that is something you would have to take into account.

What the disadvantage here is, is if you create an entity, attribute or relationship in Dev and deploy to forward facing entity, if you then remove that entity, attribute or relationship in Dev, you must "uninstall" that solution. Of course, if you have critical data in that forward facing environment, it is gone when that solution is removed. So, if you deploy from Dev to forward facing, if in the future you no longer need that entity, attribute or relationship, although you can remove it from forms, it will always remain an artifact in your system. This is a disadvantage when working with Managed solutions.