Key points – Copying environment in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Few key points for quick reference, if we plan to copy Dynamics 365 Marketing environment.

You could find all the details here –

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/manage-marketing-environments

Copy procedure will –

• Delete the target environment
• Uninstall the Dynamics 365 Marketing on the target environment (if the target environment already has the marketing license it will take over the same license).
• Delete all the interactions records – email clicks, website visits, etc. and images used in Email and Marketing Pages (they need to be backed up in separate storage, the marketing environment backup will not have that data as it is managed separately / differently by Marketing Service including Marketing Insight Service).

After Copy –

• We need to re-run the Marketing Setup as the email sending and insights services will not work.
• The marketing setup will create a new set of marketing services, therefore new interaction data will be created.
• We need to again Authenticate Domain and update the DNS records.
• Images used in Email and Marketing pages in Source Environment will have to be uploaded again in the Target Environment, else they will keep referring to the images hosted in the source environment.
• All the emails, customer journeys, lead-score records, and more will be in the draft stage after copy, they need to be updated to the go-live status in the target environment.
• All real-time journeys will be in the stopped stage, to restart them the journey must be duplicated before it can be executed.
• In case Power App portals are being used, they need to reset first in the target environment to release the license and need to be configured again after copy

Also,

We can use the Configuration Migration Utility to move data between environments – marketing pages, journeys, emails, etc.

Interaction data cannot be to transferred to the target environment.

Solution export and import procedure can be used to move the customizations between different environments.

For extracting marketing interactions – https://community.dynamics.com/365/dynamics-365-fasttrack/b/dynamics-365-fasttrack-blog/posts/extracting-marketing-interactions-in-dynamics-365-marketing

Below is our marketing app showing configured before copy –

and after copying the environment, as expected, shows Not configured.

On trying to re-run the marketing setup we got the below error –

Click on Retry starts the uninstall process

We had to raise the Microsoft Support which eventually fixed the issue at their end with the help of Product Group team.

Hope it helps..