Dynamics 365 to Salesforce migration.

Why the Dynamics 365 → Salesforce migration goes wrong

Dynamics 365 looks like Salesforce in the same way that a freight train looks like a passenger train. Same gauge, very different operating model. Six places it quietly breaks:

• Business unit hierarchy. Dataverse's Business Unit tree drives ownership and visibility for every record. Salesforce has no direct equivalent, the closest mapping is Role hierarchy plus Account/Owner. The translation is rarely 1:1 and has to be modeled before any record moves, or post-migration visibility regresses.
• Security roles + privileges. Dataverse's role-based privileges with depth (User / Business Unit / Parent: Child / Organization) don't map cleanly to Salesforce's Profile + Permission Set model. Get the translation wrong and either users can't see their pipeline or they can suddenly see everyone's.
• Plugin + workflow pipeline state. Dynamics plugins fire on stages (pre-validation, pre-operation, post-operation, async). A bulk extract during business hours catches records in mid-flight. The migration has to fence the source, or accept that some records will be replayed once the target's triggers settle.
• Alternate keys + composite keys. Dataverse supports alternate keys (unique constraints on combinations of fields). Salesforce supports External IDs on a single field. Multi-field alternate keys must be resolved to a single deterministic external ID per row before insert, or upserts conflict.
• Option sets + global option sets + localized labels. Dataverse option sets are integer-valued and can be localized per user language. Salesforce picklists are string-valued and shared. The mapping has to pick the canonical language and preserve the integer-to-string translation, or downstream reports built on integer values silently break.
• Connections + connection roles. Dataverse Connections (and N:N relationships) don't map natively to Salesforce. The decision, junction object, lookup, or self-relationship, has to be made per-relationship.

Deliverables

• Workspace archive at completion. Your data, packaged. Dataverse Web API extracts, business-unit-to-role translation, option-set transforms, every dry-run trace, every gate decision.
• Signed audit chain. Every record movement chained via SHA-256, sealed every 256 leaves with Ed25519. Your auditor verifies the chain on her own laptop. Protocol published →
• Salesforce-aware mapping. Lead/Contact/Account/Opportunity graph populated coherently. Profile + Permission Set strategy designed to match the Business Unit hierarchy's intent, not just its shape.
• Replay manifest. Every migration is replayable. The compliance-review conversation that used to take six weeks runs in forty minutes.