Moving a live marketing operation to Real-Time Journeys.
A complete engine swap, executed while campaigns kept running.
The situation
When Microsoft retired the previous marketing engine in Dynamics 365, every customer faced the same project: most of the catalogue — journeys, emails, forms, segments — could not simply be imported into Customer Insights – Journeys; the new engine expected recreation rather than migration. For this platform the stakes were higher than a content move. The marketing operation carried years of accumulated mechanics: a journey generated programmatically for every event, a home-built double opt-in that predated the platform’s native support, and a dated consent trail the business could not afford to lose. DynaVerto led the technical side of the transition.
What we did
The transition ran incrementally, with the new engine taking over one mechanism at a time while the old one kept serving. Event registration moved from a dedicated portal to forms; journeys generated per event gave way to configurable event journeys with reminders and follow-ups. The home-built double opt-in — several journeys and status choreography, built because the business needed it before the platform offered it — was retired in favour of the native mechanism once that existed, mapped onto the platform’s consent points. Segments went through three eras: reused legacy segments first, then marketing lists bridged to the new engine’s segments, then native membership once the platform allowed adding people directly. Campaigns kept running throughout — volumes were modest enough to move deliberately, and nothing was paused.
The hardest part was not building — it was promoting. The previous era moved marketing objects between environments with ETL packages that preserved identifiers, so a tested configuration could be mirrored exactly. The new engine restricted that: part of the catalogue does not travel in solutions, a transferred journey arrives unable to publish, a stopped journey is permanently read-only, and the dependency chain — compliance profile, then preference centre, then form — has to be rebuilt in order, per environment. Promotion had to be relearned as recreation with verification, rather than transfer.
The old engine was eventually uninstalled by Microsoft itself — and nothing on the platform noticed, which was the point.
In five lines
- Engine swap executed incrementally on a live marketing operation — no campaign pause
- Double opt-in built years before native support, then retired in favour of the platform’s own mechanism without losing history
- Segments through three eras: legacy reuse → marketing-list bridge → native membership
- Event pipeline moved from portal to forms, with per-event journeys replaced by configurable ones
- Cross-environment promotion relearned as recreation with verification when identifier-preserving transfer stopped being possible
Results
- Production inventory today: 1,035 journeys, 1,093 emails, 679 segments and 291 forms running on the new engine
- 215 events managed through the platform — from a handful in the first year to 123 the following year, with 88 more by late August of this year
- Double opt-in operating per market on the native mechanism
- The dated consent ledger crossed the transition intact — see the consent model
- The retired engine left the environment with nothing still depending on it
All engagements are anonymised. References available on request, subject to client approval.
Still on the old marketing engine, or mid-transition?
Mid-transition or still planning it? We’ve done the ugly parts once already.