Hi Kevin,
You are on the right track by using managed solution in production. At times people are tempted to make changes quickly so they make the change directly in production but that gets all other environments out of date and more time is spent
in making sure environments are in sycn.
It is always best practice to make changes in development so that we can test before any changes are moved to production. In terms of issues, here is the list of them you might face:
1) Deleting field from managed solution is pain. CRM will not allow you to do this it will complain about deleting field as part of managed solution so if there is any deletion fields required, clean-up in the unmanaged solution and then import the same
as managed in production.
2) Importing managed solution on top of existing unmanaged solution will not work. CRM will complain and when you are attempting this by deleting just the solution, it might still have few issues. If the tests for the same are positive, it might work well
in production.
More information can be found here:
http://www.felinesoft.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/what-are-the-differences-between-managed-and-unmanaged-solutions-in-crm-2011/
I do not recommend managed in production to enforce tighter change management process. Even though customizations are easier in CRM, change control needs to be tighter to make sure people follow right process in the organisation.
Hope this helps.
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Minal Dahiya
blog : http://minaldahiya.blogspot.com.au/
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