Integration Platform Modernisation as Part of a Dynamics 365 Cloud Migration for a UK Certification Body
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Integration Platform Modernisation as Part of a Dynamics 365 Cloud Migration for a UK Certification Body
As part of a wider Dynamics 365 cloud migration, VE3 decommissioned and fully re-engineered the integration estate of a UK professional certification and membership organisation. The estate was anchored by 139 active BizTalk Server orchestrations connecting the CRM to its member portal, Finance & Operations system, assessment platforms, and marketing tools. With BizTalk itself approaching end-of-life alongside the on-premises CRM, both had to be decommissioned simultaneously, without disrupting any of the live business processes that depended on them.
The BizTalk estate covered member portal sync, Finance & Operations interfaces, automated correspondence, exam platform feeds, and marketing integrations - each an independent engineering task requiring individual discovery, redesign, development, and validation. Sequential delivery was incompatible with the programme timeline
Every orchestration underpinned a live process. New Logic Apps had to be developed, tested against live data, and validated for parity before any BizTalk endpoint could be retired - requiring sustained side-by-side parallel operation across the full estate.
The Dynamics 365 cloud environment against which Logic Apps would ultimately operate had not yet been provisioned. Waiting for the platform migration to complete before starting integration work would have added months to the timeline.
Alongside BizTalk, 787 custom scheduled jobs ran on a bespoke Windows service executing T-SQL queries against the CRM database. Entirely undocumented, every job had to be individually reverse-engineered and rearchitected to cloud-native equivalents.
BizTalk provided no real-time integration health visibility. Failures were discovered only when downstream processes broke, and diagnosis required specialist expertise that was increasingly difficult to find. The organisation had no alerting, no structured logging, and no monitoring.
The CRM-to-F&O interface handling financial data and invoice synchronisation was among the most complex in the estate. The move to cloud required evaluating whether native Microsoft patterns such as Dual-Write could replace bespoke BizTalk middleware before any development commitment was made.
VE3 established a continuously synchronised mirror of the on-premises CRM in the cloud tenant using Simego DataSync Studio. This gave the integration team a live, representative development target from the programme's first sprint - enabling Logic Apps development to begin months before the cloud platform was production-ready and compressing an estimated 8-12 weeks from the programme timeline.
All 156 identified orchestrations were catalogued by business criticality, technical complexity, and dependency chain, then grouped into three prioritised delivery waves. The highest-risk integrations were de-risked first, with patterns from each wave applied to subsequent ones.
Every Logic App was designed to cloud-native patterns - not a direct BizTalk translation. Azure Service Bus provided decoupled messaging for high-volume async integrations, replacing synchronous BizTalk patterns that had caused latency under peak load. Azure Functions handled intensive transformation logic, with Entra ID enforcing least-privilege access across all API endpoints.
A consistent observability framework was applied across the full estate - structured error handling, configurable retry logic, dead-letter queue processing, and real-time alerting via Azure Application Insights. Integration failures now surface immediately with structured diagnostic data, enabling fast resolution without specialist expertise.
Each of the 322 active scheduled jobs was analysed, classified, and rearchitected as an Azure Function with a Timer trigger or a Power Automate flow. The CRM Additions database was migrated to Azure SQL to preserve data dependencies. The bespoke Windows service was fully decommissioned.
New Logic Apps ran in parallel alongside BizTalk equivalents throughout each wave, processing live production data. Parity was confirmed - functionally and for data integrity - before each BizTalk endpoint was retired. No integration was decommissioned without confirmed equivalence.
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VE3's parallel delivery model - anchored by the Simego DataSync cloud shadow environment, was the critical design decision that made this programme achievable within a fixed timeline. The organisation now operates an integration estate that is faster, fully observable, completely documented, and free of the end-of-life infrastructure that had anchored it to the legacy platform.
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