RapidStart CRM Installing Addons
What are RapidStart CRM Addons?
RapidStart CRM is a Model-Driven Power App that offers basic Sales and Service functionality. The capabilities can be extended by either customization or the installation of pre-built Addons, or a combination of both.
Note: You will need to have upgraded to RapidStart CRM Plus and have the System Administrator role to perform these tasks.
Before we start, if you don’t feel comfortable, or don’t have the time to perform the following, check out our Rapid LAUNCH Service.
How to get RapidStart CRM Addons
All of our addons are available here in Microsoft’s AppSource marketplace. Before installing any addons, ours or those from others, we highly recommend creating a backup of your environment, or better yet a copy to test functionality, we’ll go through both below.
Backing up creates a copy of your environment that can be restored to a point before you had any issues. Restoring a backup is simple, however it will take a little time and may require that you reactivate flows, so it could still create a disruption for your users.
The safest option is to create a copy of your environment as a “sandbox”. This will create an exact copy, separate from your production environment. You can then install the addons and check that there are no issues before installing the addon into your actual production environment.
Why would there be any issues, with our addons in particular? RapidStart CRM is customizable and certain prior customizations you may have done, or had done, could possibly conflict with an addon. All addons are built on the latest version of RapidStart CRM and so part of the addon installation process will update your RapidStart CRM to the latest version. Don’t worry, your customizations will remain intact, but again depending on what customizations have been done, there could be conflicts with the update as well.
Step 1. Backing up an Environment
Microsoft automatically backs up environments continuously; however, creating a backup before making any significant changes is a good idea. Start by going to the Power Platform Admin Center here: https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/environments
Select your Production Environment, then click “Backups” in the nav bar.
Give your backup a meaningful name and click “Create”.
If you have not started using RapidStart CRM yet, you can skip to Step 3.
Step 2. Creating a Sandbox Copy
To create a copy, you first need to create a new environment to copy to. Go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com
Give your environment a Name (can be anything), then select Sandbox as type.
Make sure “Create a database for this environment?” is set to “Yes”, then click “Next”.
You can leave the defaults here, select the Sandbox environment you created earlier and click “Copy”.
Step 3. Adding RapidStart CRM Addons to the new Sandbox.
Log into Microsoft’s AppSource
On the screen that opens, select the sandbox environment you created earlier, then accept Microsoft’s Terms and click “Install”.
It may take some time, and a few screen refreshes, but you will eventually see RapidStart CRM has been updated to the latest version and the Addon has been installed.
You can now open the sandbox environment and look for any issues. If everything looks good, you can repeat step 3 but select your production environment as the target.
Depending on your prior customizations, it is possible that the installation will simply fail. Something in your customizations is preventing the installation. You will be able to download an error log to help identify the issues that are preventing installation and your customizer can make the necessary changes. If you need help, we have options, check our Services tab above.