- Posts tagged CRM 2011
- Explore CRM 2011 on posterous
CRM Email Router and Office 365
We were recently moved from Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) to the new Office 365 platform.
BPOS was built on the 2007 range of Microsoft’s server products, so the step up to SharePoint and Exchange 2010 is very welcome.
However, I needed to reconfigure our CRM email router to process emails from the new system.
I tried all sorts of weird and wonderful email server URLs and kept being greeted by ‘401 Unauthorised errors’. Using auto-discover seemed to work for a few of the mailboxes, but it was very slow and occasionally stopped working until the Email Router service was restarted.
Finally, I got it working. After accessing webmail from the 365 portal, take the URL from the address bar and adapt it for the Exchange web service URL e.g.
Another problem I faced was user passwords being incorrect. Before you are transitioned to Office 365, Microsoft advises you to change your BPOS password, so that it is replicated in the 365 system. If users don’t do this, they won’t be able to access their email until the transition has been marked as complete. Neither administrators or Microsoft support can reset passwords until it has been completed.
Frustratingly, it took 5 days to complete our transition, so some of our users were locked out for quite some time.
Luckily, if the user can remember their old password, they can still sign in with the Microsoft Online Sign-In tool, change their password and then log into Office 365. If they can’t remember it, pray that your transition is a fast one!
Add a CRM Calendar to a dashboard
Dashboards in Dynamics CRM 2011 are a great way to visualize data. Did you know that they can also be used to view pretty much any other web content?
I’ve recently had a requirement to add the CRM Calendar to a dashboard. I could have simply added a list of appointment activities to the dashboard, but the actual calendar control looks a lot nicer.
To do this, first we need to get the URL of the Calendar page. Load up the IE developer tools (F12 in IE9) and start a profiler. Now navigate to the calendar in CRM and click on ‘Month’, ‘Week’ and ‘Day’ (we want the URL for each page).
CRM 2011 Update Rollup 1
Update Rollup 1 for Dynamics CRM 2011 has been released and fixes a lot of issues. You can get the update from Microsoft downloads now or wait for it to be pushed out via Windows update on 26th April 2011.
CRM 2011 Add Multiple Users Error
I've been having an issue when trying to add multiple users on the CRM 2011 release candidate. I could add individual users fine, but the multiple users wizard showed the below error after selecting the license type and authentication provider.
I looked in the event viewer and saw this message
Exception information: Exception type: ActiveDirectoryObjectNotFoundException Exception message: The specified domain does not exist or cannot be contacted.
I could add users fine individually, so my domain could definitely be contacted, so why was this error only occuring when trying to load multiple users? I turned on tracing, which displayed this:
Process: w3wp |Organization:38fbda44-2715-e011-8b1e-00151d004a11 | Thread: 4 |Category: Exception |User: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 | Level: Error | SystemLabelDictionaryCacheLoader.LogDetails
CRM 2011 Repeated Login Prompt
Updated at the bottom for the CRM 2011 Release Candidate.
I've had this issue recently and it was driving me crazy. The CRM worked fine from the server with http://localhost and http://server-name, but if I tried to access it from anywhere else, I was repeatedly asked for login credentials. I got around it temporarily by adding a host header to the site, but this still caused me problems when trying to access the web services.I've read some articles suggesting the below method to fix this:
- go to IIS manager
- select the CRM website
- select Authentication
- select windows authentication
- click on Providers, and add kerberos as the second enabled provider after NTLM
Unfortunately, this didn't work for me. Instead, I got it working by editing the file %windir%\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config as below.
For all of the CRM web site nodes find and replace all instances of: -
<windowsAuthentication enabled="true" />
with
<windowsAuthentication enabled="true" useAppPoolCredentials="true" />
Upgrading a CRM 4 Organisation to Dynamics CRM 2011
I've posted another short video, showing how easy it is to upgrade a Dynamics CRM 4 organisation to Dynamics CRM 2011.
The steps involved were: -
- Backup current CRM 4 organisation
- Restore the database to the SQL server hosting the other CRM organisations
- Use the Deployment Manage import wizard
- Map any users that exist in the organisation to Active Directory accounts. If you are restoring to a server in the same domain, auto mapping users should work fine
- Run the import
- Log in and test
I did this using the all in one virtual server I had set up previously, which is proving to be a great little training ground!
Dynamics CRM 2011 Solutions
Dynamics CRM 2011 Dashboards
The new real-time dashboards in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, finally brings Dynamics CRM reporting in line with the competition.
Dashboards are likely to be the new favourite feature among business and sales users who enjoy looking at pretty charts with lines pointing the right way. More importantly, they offer a powerful way to view and analyse business performance based on real-time statistics.
Dynamics CRM 2011 beta setup
I've created a short video guide for setting up the Dynamics CRM 2011 on-premise beta. I installed all of the services on to the same virtual machine, so some of the things done will not reflect best practices. The whole installation (excluding Windows setup and updates) took took just over an hour but I've tried to cut as many of the progress bars as possible.
Before I started recording, I installed Windows Server 2008 with SP2 and all available updates. I also turned off UAC and the Windows firewall.
If the video below does not work, please try here. Be sure to watch it in full screen HD, otherwise the quality is not great.
CRM 2011 Beta
The official Dynamics CRM 2011 beta website has just been put live. Head on over to http://offers.crmchoice.com/CRM2011Beta-Landing and register for the official software download and beta forums.
There are also a lot of demo videos to give you an overview of the new features. I'm really looking forward to the new dashboards and can't wait to get started with the beta!
Edit: The download page is here
