What is data migration?

One question that I get asked a lot from inexperienced solution architects is “Why do I care what the data looks like? It’s not my problem as a solution architect.” Well, that’s not exactly true. As we’ve mentioned in a previous chapter, the solution architect is responsible for everything in the project, and data management/migration is one of the most important. I guess first off, we need to understand what data migration is. The simplest way to look at it is that data migration is the process of moving data from an existing system and importing it into D365.

And that data can come in many forms. It could be in an existing system, Excel spreadsheets, or flat files. Or even better, it might exist on paper in file cabinets (those projects are the ones where I want to cry). In any case, the data needs to be put into D365. But not all data. The only type of data that should be migrated is what is called master data. We’...