RESOLVED: Issue when copying CRM Portal from PROD to DEV

Recently, I faced an issue when we copied our Production CRM instance down to Development instance. The CRM Portal on development instance stopped working.

Issue

CRM Portal on development instance was showing provisioning for a very long time. It felt like was stuck in a loop of provisioning the portal instance.

Now, this could happen due to many other reasons as well. If the below explanation sounds like what you have seen/done in your instance then follow the resolution steps.

Resolution

First of all lets look at how internally the portal copy works. When you provision a CRM Portal by installing a Portal Add-on, it will look for the solutions pertinent to it in the target instance. If no solution is found the Add-on will install them. On the other hand, if Add-on finds the solution then it will first uninstall and reinstall them to ensure the latest version is installed.

If there were any customization done on the actual OOB portal solution it might run into issue during uninstalling the solution and creating the above said issue.

To ensure resolution below are the recommended steps,

• Reset the development CRM instance to OOB. You can pick any or all module to be installed during the reset.
• Provision a new Portal on development CRM instance
• Once the above steps are done, check if CRM and portal both are working correctly. Everything should be OOB installation. If you had issues provisioning Portal even after resetting CRM then please reach out to Microsoft support.
• Now, initiate the copy of production CRM instance to development instance.
• After the copy is completed, login to development CRM instance and go to Portal Website Bindings and delete the production binding.
• Go to Portal Management page and hit “Restart”. This will make sure that a new website binding is created.

If no portal binding gets created then you may have to reach out to Microsoft support and ask them to “reset and recreate the Portal binding” which should resolve the error. In most of the cases it should get resolved by restarting the Portal.

Hope this helps.