Dynamics 8.1 and 365: Is the "Publisher" portable for managed solutions?

Question

We are in the process of creating and publishing a managed solution built on CRM 2016 8.1. This solution is meant to be forward-compatible with 9.x, and we plan to publish it to AppSource.

We may need to migrate our Publisher from one instance of CRM 2016 8.1 to another, and expect to be able to publish and deploy to the AppSource afterwards.

However, after much research, I can't figure out if the Publisher itself is easily migrated.

Let's say in our original instance, instance A, we have exported a managed solution and published it to AppSource.

Now we want to migrate to instance B. We import the unmanaged solution into B, make changes, increment the version number, and export a new version of the managed solution. We now try to publish this as an upgrade to our existing solution in AppSource (or by means of distributing an upgraded managed package to our clients).

Will this work? Or is there something that ties our publisher record to that instance that we need to be aware of?

Answer 1

Publisher information and other solution identification is maintained in the solution and transfers to your target organization. So if you apply your unmanaged solution to another org, that publisher will now exist in the target system, and you should be able to then export an update to a third system.

That being said, I wouldn't be shocked if you ran into issues carrying out this operation. There are still quite a few gotchas lurking within the solution metadata.