December 2020 – Alan Mervitz

The end of xRM Portals Community Edition

December 25, 2021December 31, 2020 by Alan

As 2020 comes to an end, so does xRM Portals Community Edition. On December 19th, 2020, I marked the GitHub project as archived, so that everything would become read-only, including the code, wiki, and issue management features.

I was a little hesitant to take this step because of my personal connection to the code, my career, and all the unsung developers that worked tirelessly to build it from its inception at Adxstudio all the way until its acquisition and one-time release by Microsoft. Nostalgia aside, I feel it was the right time, given the ever-increasing inactivity on the project and my judgement of it having accomplished the project’s goal of providing a migration path to Microsoft’s online portals service.

What follows is my retrospective of the project.

Blog posts I’ve lost to the ethers of time

December 25, 2021December 30, 2020 by Alan

The web is an ephemeral medium, if you’re not careful. Throughout my career, I’ve written blog posts for the company I’ve worked for. Over time, those websites or their content have been removed, and before their removal I copied the posts to my personal blog to keep a record of what I’d written.

But alas, I missed two blog posts I wrote in 2014 working at Adxstudio and can’t find a copy of them. They were, admittedly, not very high quality content, and from what I can tell they were removed from the site within a few months by someone who must have thought they weren’t good enough to stay published!

Announcing the CrmDataPackager PowerShell module

December 25, 2021December 20, 2020 by Alan

I’ve released a new PowerShell module, CrmDataPackager, that lets you unpack Configuration Migration data zip files into separate files per record, m2m relationship, and even individual fields.

This module’s commands help you achieve ALM for your Dynamics 365 / Dataverse / Power Apps / CDS / CRM data. The commands included are Expand-CrmData and Compress-CrmData, which are analogous to the pack and unpack operations of Solution Packager, but used for configuration data.