Migrating from CRM2011 Online to CRM2011 on premises

A lot of times I read on forums that people are asking if it is possible to migrate their data and customizations from CRM2011 online to CRM2011 on premises. Customizations is not really a problem because you can just import and export the solution. However, migrating data is not so straightforward.

Many companies first start with the CRM2011 Online and then later migrate to CRM2011 on premises. Why do they do this? Here are some possible reasons:
- Because CRM2011 Online might have technical limitations for their specific needs  (not that there are so many differences)
- They didn’t want to pay for server licenses and CALs in the beginning because they were just "trying out" CRM2011.
Now after some time they see what a great product Dynamics CRM is and want to invest in implementing it in their own environment.
- They don’t like the idea of having their company data in the cloud and not in their own environment. (I think we can trust Microsoft
with our data, but you would be surprised how many companies think like this)
- Legal issues: In the past I was working with a customer that wanted to change certain clauses in the contract, because they didn’t agree with certain points. From experience I’ve learned that Microsoft rarely or never changes its contract.

I’m not saying these are all valid reasons to switch. There are also many benefits of choosing for CRM2011 Online, think of scalability for instance.

But if we come back to the question: Is it possible to migrate data and customizations from CRM2011 online to CRM2011 on premises?
Yes it is, no problem! To support this procedure Microsoft has released a handy whitepaper that will guide you step by step through the process
of migrating your online CRM2011 organization to CRM2011 on premises.

You can download the whitepaper via the following link: Microsoft CRM Online Data Migration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on-premises

Another solution is to use a third party data migration application like Scribe. Using this application you can connect to your online environment and your on premises environment to copy over the data.