Advanced find and Many to Many (N:N) in CRM 2011

I had a discussion today with a potential customer regarding a part of the functionality of advanced find that I thought I might share as it is not so obvious.

In Dynamics CRM 4, it is not possible, with advanced find to use the "related" entities functionality of advanced find to search for objects that are on the other side of the N:N relationship.

However, in CRM 2011 this is possible. For instance, if a new relationship N:N is created between account and contact, it is possible to use advanced find to find all contacts that are connected to a certain company.

It is not, however, possible to show column data from the related entities through an N:N relationship, it is only possible to pick columns through N:1 relationships (in that direction).

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
http://www.blogger.com/www.crmkonsulterna.se

Finding the TCP port for Dynamic Excel Export

The dynamic Excel export functionality of Dynamics CRM is a real killer functionality. I often get standing ovations from users, especially managers, when showing dynamic pivot table functions of CRM, partly due to the fact that many users don't actually know what pivot tables are and find them rahter magical.
I was working with a demo environment today and had some issues getting the dynamic excel to load data from CRM properly. I got the error message: "Connection failed". This was a lab environment with a separate Windows 7 virtual machine in an on-premise installation. This is important, because in IFD or CRM-online, dynamic excel data is tunneled through the outlook addon, but not when using the on-premise installation when it communicates directly with the server.

So I started looking for answers on the internet and found the following thread on the CRM forum which helped out a bit: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/crmdeployment/thread/c2d3029c-5487-435b-90e7-ba030aeba8ac

I started by trying to do the obvious thing by opening the TCP port 1433, the SQL communication port in the firewall. This did not help. According to some of the participants of the thread, this KB article by Microsoft might help: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968872 - it does more or less the same thing, opens 1433 and some additional ports in the firewall all related to SQL. However, it did not help either.

One of the participants of the thread mentioned that he had opened the TCP port 53021, something I found very strange if it was to work, since ports this high are not supposed to be used as incoming ports but are ephemeral ports. I tried opening this port as well, but it didn't work either. The port number seemd sort of random so it might be that my deployment just used some other high port number.

A colleague of mine working at Hermelin IT-Partner, Anders Jildestrand, then joined me in the hunt for the mysterious TCP port. With his assistance and netstat we got the following result:

C:\Users\administrator>netstat
Active Connections
  Proto  Local Address          Foreign Address        State
  TCP    192.168.75.15:3389     192.168.75.131:29837   ESTABLISHED
  TCP    192.168.75.15:52422    192.168.75.13:5555     ESTABLISHED
  TCP    192.168.75.15:52426    WIN-LGEKH2VQ6FI:epmap  TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.75.15:52427    WIN-LGEKH2VQ6FI:49155  TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.75.15:52428    192.168.75.13:63831    SYN_SENT
C:\Users\administrator>

And if you are sharp eyed, you might spot it, as we had the SQL-server on the CRM server, and the TCP-SYN was sent but never answered, it is of course the last row, hence the TCP port 63831.

After opening this port in the firewall, the dynamic Excel worked just like it should.

The question now remains. Why this port?

We also had a discussion on which program, CRM or SQL Server that is actually answering this call, and it seems that it is actually SQL Server since the ODBC connectionstring in the Excel-file is directed to the SQL-server, not the CRM-server. But I think we could probably investigate this further with fiddler. If you have any interesting input, please leave a comment!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Running Microsofts Demo VPC on Windows 7

Running Microsofts CRM Demo VPC (Available on Partnersource) on Windows 7 is a bit problematic but can be done. I found a good blog that showed how it can be done using VirtualBox but there were some extra things that needed to be done to make it work.
As many of you probably are aware, from Windows Server 2008, only 64 bit versions of the server operating systems are available which isn't very strange since the 32 bit versions of Windows only support up to 3.5 GB of memory which is really enough for even a small server.

Hence the Virtual Machine that Microsoft have released with a demo environment of CRM 2011 is based on this 64 bit environment. Since Windows Virtual PC, the Virtualization Technology for Windows 7 does not support 64 bit guest operating systems, it has been created on Hyper-V and is meant to be run on this virtualization technology. However, this is not really what you average CRM salesperson is running in his or her Lenovo X11 for many obvious reasons, power management probably being one of the most striking.

So, it is it just not possible to run the demo environment on a Windows 7 machine? Yes, it is. On the blog Leon's CRM Musings there is a very informative posting on how to make the virtual harddrive work in the VirtualBox virtualization technology. I was quite amazed when I saw this working as this is quite similar to installing an operating system on a computer, ripping out the harddrive and screwing it into a completely different computer and hoping it will work. However, the Hyper-V virtualization and VirtualBox virtualization must be very similar from the guest operating system perspective, otherwise the operatingsystem would have given a lot of errors.

Do note the part in the posting that the demo image does not support being run as a SATA drive but must be run as an IDE harddrive.

There are some comments that both SharePoint and CRM are installed on port 80. This is in part true, but they are installed on different websites separated by different host headers.

However, the sharepoint site did not work when I tried running it, hence the document manangement from CRM did not work either. After checking the IIS website bindings and the host-file (C:\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) I noticed that the host headers for the SharePoint site and some other sites were pointed at the IP 192.169.100.1 and a quick check with ipconfig showed that this was not the ip of the current computer. Hence I just changed the mapping to be 127.0.0.1 (always means "this" computer).

I then closed all IE-windows, flushed the DNS (ipconfig /flushdns) just to be sure, then tried the sharepoint site, and it worked. As did the document management in CRM.

I saw some people in Leon's blog commenting on the networking issues of making the exchange server communicate with the CRM-server. This can be done be setting the networkadapter in VirtualBox to "Internal Network" on the Exchange machine and using two adapters on the CRM machine, one with NAT (external) and one internal using the "Internal Network". Both the internal networks adapaters need to be configured manually, but the external one can have a dynamic IP. If anyone doesn't know how, please leave a comment and I will tell you how.

Regarding optimization of speed I strongly recommend upgrading your computers memory to at least 8 GB so that you can give the virtual machine between 4-6 GB. Try to give it even multiples of 512 MB as that will make for better memory management.

Another well known fact regarding VPC:s is disk access. It is highly recommended that you use a separate disc on a high speed controller (i.e. USB 3.0/eSATA/internal SATA).

As for processor power, it is not as essential, eventhough it is always nice. Try to allocate at least 2 cores to it. One for the SQL-server and one for IIS/GUI.

The recommendation that Leon gives to reduce the memory for the SQL server I am not so sure that is a good idea as CRM is very SQL heavy due to its meta data driven nature. However, if you only have 4 GB:s of memory and you have to make this VPC work, then you might have to try it. Kingston memory modules are very cheap now, 2x4 GB for a T410 is less than €100 last time I checked.

I have several computers, my "sales computer" is a Lenovo T410s Corei5 8Gb with 2 SSD HD. I use one of the harddrive for my host operating system and one for the virtual machines. I have removed the DVD-drive since I never use it, and the extra drive is a lot better use of the space.

Last of all, cudos to Leon for a great solution with VirtualBox for the VPC!

Update:
An additional thing to do is to convert the VHD to the Virtualbox native VDI-format for virtual harddrive using the media Media manager in VirtualBox. This is probably a more optimized format for Virtualbox and hence a bit Quicker. (I have not tested it, it is just a thought)
I have also tried to run the VPC on an external USB SSD, both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 with 2 GB of RAM with 2 Cores on my Core i5 with the converted disk and it works fine. The SSD gives it a lot of extra speed.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Cross browser and CRM Mobile

Today Dennis Michalis, General Manager of Dynamics CRM at Microsoft announced that in Q2 2012 a service update of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will include cross browser functionality to allow users on a multitude of browsers and operting systems to finally be able to use all the great functionality of Dynamics CRM without having to use workarounds like virtualization or terminal services.

Supported Browsers (From Microsoft Roadmap PDF)

He also announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile will be released, a Micrsoft based product for bringing CRM functionality to Windows Phones, iPads/iPhones, Androids and Blackberries.

CRM Anywhere on iPad (From Microsoft Roadmap PDF)

There were also some other updates that were announced that you can read about in the Service Update Roadmap Q2 2012.

The cross browser functionality is something many of my customers have been waiting for a long time and I really look forward to seeing it. My colleague Rickard noted that no Unix/Linux based systems were mentioned in the matrix which is notable. According to what they previously have mentioned the mutlibrowser version will be based on HTML5 there might hence be two reasons for it not being included. Either it is not tested or there might be parts of the system that required Silverlight or some other component that only exist on Windows and Mac operating systems.

The other notable thing is that the mobile client will be big drawback for companies like Resco, TenDigits and CWR Mobile who have very competent mobile clients. This is always a risk for companies working with products close to Microsofts since Microsoft always need to expand and grow. So, if you are a company looking to invest in a mobile solution, think twice, it might be a good idea to wait a month or two and have a look at the Microsoft version of the product. It will require an extra cost so there will still be room for the other mobile clients but as others have previously noted, it is always hard to compete with Microsoft. Their mobile products do still have several upper hands on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile in this early version for example,  it does not support offline functionality and I would presume the mobile API is not as extensive as that of Resco or CWR Mobile (I do not have any experience of TenDigits).

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Unable to upgrade CRM 4.0 database more than once

My colleague Rickard had an interesting problem yesterday when working with a client of ours. They had a prototype upgrade and now wanted the production upgrade. However, they wanted both of these organizations to be available (yes, will required an Enterprise license or separate SPLA licensing if it is a hosting environment). The prototype upgrade they want to be available as "orgname-old" and the normal upgrade just as "orgname".

An interesting issue arose when Rickard tried to import the CRM 4.0 database into the CRM 2011 environment he receive an error message saying that a CRM 4.0 database can only be imported once into a CRM 2011 deployment. This might be noted somewhere but it is not something that I or my colleague Rickard have ever seen when working with CRM and we didn't find to much about it googling the issue either.

The problem seems to be that Microsoft seems to have cut a corner when upgrading a CRM 4.0 database in comparison to normal redeployment as it does not give the organization a new GUID. Hence you cannot import two organizations twice.

The workaround is, however, quite simple, upgrade the first database, disable it and remove it from deployment manager (do not delete it from the SQL-database).

Upgrade the second database into CRM 2011. As there is no organization with this GUID now, this is no problem.

Now, import the first database (redeployment) that you previously disabled and removed from deployment manager. You can now give it a new name if you like. As this is a redeployment, it will give this a organization a new Guid and the two organizations will not conflict.

If you are creative you can probably think of you own solution using similar techniques.

Big thanks to Rickard for input to this posting!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Problems with converting email to case

I was recently working with a customer when I noticed an interesting bug in CRM 2011, in the Outlook Client. When trying to convert an email to either a lead, case or opportunity directly from the Outlook ribbon, it does not set the "regarding" lookup field of the email that was tracked. However, if the email is first tracked, then "viewed in CRM" and then from the CRM email form converted to lead, case or opportunity, the regarding field is set correctly.

To make this a bit more clear I will describe this with a few screenshot below:


We'll start off with opening a received email and pressing the Track button in CRM

This will then allow us to press the convert to Opportunity, Case or Lead, directly from Outlook. A very neat, and new function. It came with CRM 2011. In this example, I am selecting Case.

 This will show a smaller dialog allowing you to select case (not shown here) and also prompting you if you want to open the case or not. I selected to open the case.

After opening the case, I checked the closed activities to see if the attached email that was I just converted to a case, but as you can see below there were none. I was a bit perplexed as I was showing this new functionality to the customer as was expecting to see the email here.

I went back to the email from Outlook and opened it in CRM and found that it had not been correctly connected to the case using the lookup "Regarding" field.

So, I tried it the old way. I sent myself another email, pressed the track in CRM button, and then instead of converting it directly from Outlook, i pressed the "View in CRM" button to open it in CRM.

I then converted it to a case from the ribbon menu from the CRM Email from by pressing the "To Case" button.

I was shown a similar small dialog letting me select subject for the case and similar and then the case form was shown. It was identical to when created from Outlook, but when checking the closed activities there was one important difference;

And by opening the CRM email form from the list shows it clearly:

The regarding field has been set properly.

This is a very unfortunate bug in CRM and I do hope Microsoft solve it quickly as the feature that CRM 2011 adds in Outlook by being able to convert emails to cases, opportunities and leads directly from the email form is very good but as all of you know who work close to sales or customer service people, their time is very precious and every click counts and new features that do not deliver as expected are always annoying to the user. So, until the bug has been fixed, make sure the users open the CRM form to convert the emails.

Update: Jukka Niiranen left a very informative comment to this posting below informing us that Microsoft probably will fix this bug in UR6 planned to be released in Jan 2012.
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Built in imports in CRM

I have been working with the built in import functionality for imports a bit lately and I must say that it has been improved a quite a lot. It as now reached a level where it is quite usable but there are still problematic areas you have to look out for.

I found this blog posting (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2010/03/15/importing-multiple-files-using-zip-import.aspx) which was quite interesting and enlighted me to the fact that you can import zip:ed files which is really good since there are some size limitation on file uploads to CRM. Since you usually get really good compression rates on csv and xml files this is really good news.

For those of you who don't know these limitations, the maximum upload file size to CRM is 8 MB. But if you zip the files the total size of files that can be contained within the zipfile can be up to 35 MB. Just to give you an example of the compression rates that can be achieved, we tried compressing a 70 MB xml based excel document and the zip-file we got was only 0.5 MB. That is a ratio of 1/140, less that 1% of the original size.

Zipping the import files is also good for uploading multiple files with at once, for instance when the files have dependencies or when there are attachments as this reduces the manual work a lot.

A bit of advice though. I would strongly advice against using the csv-format since it is very volatile and often brakes and gives rise to a lot of strange errors. It is also dependent on the local regional settings, for instance, in Sweden, it is not comma separated, but semi-colon separated, as this is the standard numeral separator. Very confusing.

On top of this you often have problems with codepages, if you work in other languages than english, and you have to re-save the file in UTF-8 to make it import properly. Today we also had some issues with Excel insisting on formating the Swedish personal number (Social Security Numbers) as 7.41231E+12 instead of the correct 7412311234. We had to manually force it with different kinds of formatting to save the number correctly.

It didn't end there, Excel also found it fitting to add a few empty columns to the end of our CSV-file making it impossible to import into CRM.

So, we have been working to iron these things out and we were getting there but somewhere along the line we decided to skip the CSV and to go all in for the excel as xml format instead. The files that are saved are a lot bigger but with the zip feature it is managable.

Despite the fact that the new xml-format support and the zip-support exist I think the next time I will be even more vigourous in my recommendation for an import tool such as QuickBix Integration Suite, Scribe, or Import Manager. The new import features are great but for smaller imports, not for migrations.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Nice blog posting on new CRM 2011 certifications

Back from the summer vacation and discussed CRM 2011 certifications on www.crmforum.se where my friend Fredrik Neiderud hinted about a nice blog posting by Richard Knudson regarding the new CRM 2011 certifications and what new in them.

Please read about it here: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2011/07/11/dynamics-crm-2011-certifications/

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Some interesting questions on xRM functionality

I have received a few questions from one of the readers of this blog and I will answer them bellow:

I am currently working on a project which is planning to use CRM 2011 as a development platform for migrating an existing  vertical specific LOB application.  As the existing application has a large and complicated database, I am trying to better understand how CRM 2011 can use external data, hence the following questions:
-          Can CRM 2011 use external data assuming it is exposed as an OData feed?

Yes and no. CRM 2011 cannot using some simple mode of configuration connect to an OData feed but there are numerous customizations that can be done using techniques such as javascript, mash-ups, SilverLight, XSLT or ASP.NET that can be used to work with the Odata feed. When I work with my clients, I usually try to understand what they are trying to achieve to be able to recommend a technique that fits their requirements.

-          Will CRM allow creation of Metadata for external Odata?

Yes, as mentioned above the different customization points allow for different ways of communicating and working with external data and metadata such as OData. There are no built in methods that automatically will connect OData to CRM (as I know of anyway).

-          Can CRM security model be used for external Odata?

The CRM security model is rather complex as it incorporates several concepts at the same time;

o   Security roles
o   Organizational context with ownership of objects based on this and in conjunction with the roles.
o   Sharing privileges to individual users and/or teams

This results in the fact that it is rather complex to replicate the privileges for a certain object to a related object in another system. It can be done, but requires in-depth knowledge of the CRM security model and the API:s as all data related to this can be accessed from the API.

As an example of the complexity, let’s say that you have users A, B and C. User A belongs to division inner sales, user B to division outer sales and user C to division service. All have the same role that only allows access to the accounts within the same division. The account “Vodaphone” is owned by A and A creates a new team to which he shares the rights to view the account “Vodaphone”. He then adds B to this team while creating it. Some time later he adds C to this team as well and shares read-write access directly to B as well.

This is an example that despite the fact that they all have the same roles would involve a lot of setting access rights in the external system since the adding of team members to teams indirectly sets their rights. It is not impossible to implement but quite complex and does require a considerable amount of effort. For an experienced CRM developer, probably not less than 200 hours.

When discussing issues like this with my clients, I, as I usually do, try to understand their core needs and motives so that I can suggest a good-enough solution that will give them the best bang of the buck.

-          Does CRM allow the use of external Odata in native forms or custom Silverlight UI has to be developed?

No. Fields (previously called attributes) are directly connected to the database and there is no support for virtual attributes that will retrieve data from an external source.

Integrations to external systems, using any data source, for instance OData, can of course be created that will transfer data to CRM. Data could for instance be periodically sent or sent when there is an update if the external system allows that kind of triggering.

It is also possible to jack into the retrieve or retrieve multiple events that occur when CRM tries to retrieve data so that CRM could pull data from the external data source when data is retrieved. I would not recommend this though since these events occur a lot and it would probably affect performance badly. It is also supported to fetch data directly from the database views using SQL and that would bypass this logic making this data incorrect. This would also cause some problems with working with CRM offline.

The solution you are hinting at using Silverlight is of course also an option but would be similar to some mash-up integration that could also be created using ASP.NET or javascript.

It would sometimes also be an option to create specific reports in CRM that connect to external data sources and integrate the CRM data with the external data in this manner. This method is preferable when using data warehousing or when there are heavy performance issues, as these reports can be cached and scheduled.

Without knowing more about the specific requirements, I would hence recommend some kind of periodic or live integration that transfers the required data to CRM in read-only fields as this would be most in line with how CRM works and would enable all built in features that CRM has to work with this data. It would also be best from a performance perspective and could be scaled if needed.

-          Can external Odata be used in Workflow activities?

Yes, custom workflows activities can be created in all versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 except CRM Online where the same logic can be created with some work-around effort using plugins instead. These custom workflow activities are created using the .NET framework typically in C# and can hence easily use any available datasource, like Odata.

On a related front, does CRM allow complicated (i.e. highly normalized and multi-level) data hierarchies to be implemented  natively?  If so, is there a performance penalty?  Would we be better off using this data as an external OData feed or bringing it internal to CRM?

No, CRM does not support some of the more complex OO concepts like interfaces and inheritance. As this is something many of us in the CRM community are looking for and it would also be a great addition to the xRM concept so I am certain it is on Microsoft’s list of features they are trying to implement. How far up, I cannot say.

This is usually not a major issue for me when I work with my clients and I have created very complex verticalizations, for instance for the Telco industry which implement a highly normalized and multi-level information model called SID, in CRM. What you need to do is make it a bit more flat and more concrete which you more or less have to do anyway if you want to make the system usable. It is of course important to be well aware of the simplifications you are making but I do not imagine that any usable system possibly could implement the entire SID information model without simplification and still make the system usable and with any reasonable budget. The abstract class “Party” for instance is just too abstract to be of any real use, but it is of course useful to know that contact, account, competitor, lead, system user etc. do share some information. The implementation would however have benefited from one or two inheritances or interfaces.

If the data should be kept in or outside the system is not easy to answer without deeper knowledge of what you are trying to implement. If you keep it mostly outside, you would have to define a very strict line at which information is kept inside or outside of CRM. Do not, however, underestimate the power of the xRM platform, it is often advantageous to implement large or all parts of the LOB application inside CRM/xRM since you get so much functionality for free when doing this.

In general I would need deeper domain knowledge to be able to give you more direct recommendations and I do not think that this is the forum for that kind of discussion as that requires a dialog and would probably best be done in workshops.

I do like the fact that you sent me these questions as I think they are very relevant when looking at the system from an xRM perspective and put the finger on some of the issues that Microsoft have to improve in the system. If there are other readers out there, if you have questions, please send them to me and I will try to answer them on this blog.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Today I was deploying a solution to a production environment and ran into a quite difficult problem; the custom report we had made could not be uploaded to CRM and the error description was rather cryptic. This error description was independent on if we tried to import the entire solution or just added the report directly. The error we received was the following:

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault, Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk, Version=5.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]:

An error occurred while trying to add the report to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Try adding the report again. If this problem persists, contact your system administrator.Detail:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xrm/2011/Contracts">
  -2147188072
  http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic" />
  An error occurred while trying to add the report to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Try adding the report again. If this problem persists, contact your system administrator.
  2011-06-16T07:43:12.1856313Z
 
 


I Binged/Googled the webb some and found that this article probably describes this error as it fits our environmen setup:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2491352

The error was due to the fact that reports written for SQL 2008 R2 are not compatible with SQL 2008. This has some very important effects as many customers might be running SQL 2008 for the production environments and many developers work with SQL 2008 R2 when developing. This difference might not be noticeable in general but this fact will cause these reports  to not be importable into the production environment.
So, a general suggestion is to have all environments, development, development test, acceptance test, training and production on exactly the same version of both Windows server and SQL-server to avoid any errors showing up in one of the environments but not the other, something that can be very problematic to solve due to the difficulty of finding the error since it by definition cannot be replicated on some of the environments.
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Problem with Custom Workflow Activities in CRM 2011

The workflow activities framework for CRM 2011 has been upgraded from CRM 4.0. The dependance properties have been removed and it now support the simplified datatypes used in CRM 2011 like DateTime.

I was developing a custom activity today and I had an output argument that was of the type EntityReference. However, when I tried to run it I got a weird error:

"The argument of type 'Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.EntityReference' cannot be used. Make sure that it is declared on an activity."

The argument declaration looked like this:

[Output("The Output of special entity")]
[ReferenceTarget("new_specialentity")]
public OutArgument specOut { get; set; }

And I am trying to set it with the following code:

specOut = new OutArgument();
Entity outent = entities.Entities[0];
specOut.Set(executionContext, outent.ToEntityReference());

I had also tried creating the entity reference with a default contstructor and filling id and logicalname, with the constructor setting id and logicalname. I had even tried setting it using the entity directly but they all give the same error. I had not found anything useful on the internet or in the SDK.

After some rethinking I looked closer at the error message and thought that there might be something wrong with the declaration or definition of the OutArgument. And after some tries I found that the error was that I had created a new OutArgument which is wrong, it is precreated and this was the reason for the error. Hence I just removed the line:

specOut = new OutArgument();

and it work like it should have from the beginning.

It is always interesting to work with new technology!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Ignoring system checks during installation of CRM

Sometimes when installing, it can be necessary to allow the installation to take place despite the fact that some of the system checks that are conducted during the installation fail. There are some different places mentioning how to do this, it is actually rather simple, you just have to add the DWORD key IgnoreChecks with a value of "1" to the MSCRM key in the registry [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM].


Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Problems when connecting PluginRegistration Tool to CRM

I was going to deploy some plugins to a server today and when I tried to connect to the CRM with the PlugingRegistration.exe I found got the following error:

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException: The server was unable to process the request due to an internal error.

So I switched on the tracing in CRM and read the following from the trace log (edited):

System.IO.FileNotFoundException, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Xrm.Client, Version=5.0.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

The error seems to originate from CRM not being able to find the Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll file. After some fiddeling, I fixed it by copying the file from the SDK\bin directory to CRMWeb\bin directory. It is a bit strange that it is required that you do this, and it will probably be fixed in future rollups of CRM 2011.

By the way, I heard some rumors from the CRM Statement of Direction that CRM 6 will be released Q2 2012 and that it will have multibrowser support. The feature we have all been waiting for, and it is probably going to be more or less the same thing as the 2011 version but with multibrowser support. So Software Assurance will probably be a good idea this year for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

New design and name

Since I live by the principle that you should focus on what you are good at and leave the rest to others, I must admit that my SharePoint experience is degrading due to the fact that I havn't worked with it for several years. This can also be seen in the postings that I have done on the blog, where almost 100% of the posting during the last years have regarded Dynamics CRM.

The natural conclusion of this is that this blog should also focus, hence I have renamed it to Gustaf's Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog omitting the previous SharePoint part.

I also revised the layout of the blog, to freshen things up a bit.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Debugging sandboxed plugins

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 includes a feature to allow sandboxing of plugins. This means that the program execution is fenced off from the rest of the server to avoid any buggs or exploit attempts in the plugins to affect the rest of the server. This is most useful in the CRM Online and partner hosted deployments but can also be used in normal on-premise solutions to fence off some risky code.

When developing plugins, I strongly recommend a local CRM installation, even if the deployment of the plugin is going to be on CRM Online. It is not possible to step-debug programs on CRM online for natural reasons, and the shotgun-debugging approach that is available from the CRM Plugin SDK is quite rough and does increase development time.

Normally when step-debugging plugins, you would attach to the w3wp process for the CRM app-pool.

However, you do have to remember that plugins that are registered to be run in the sandbox, actually are executed under a different process hence you cannot attach to the w3wp process when debugging but instead have to attach to the Sandbox process.

If you would like, it is also possible to register the plugin outside the sandbox first while developing and the re-register it in the sandbox later. Some errors might, however, only show when working with sandboxed plugins so it is also good to be able to debug these.

Do note that it I have installed the sandbox to use Network Servce as the executing account, this is not recommended for production deployments, since that will nullify some of the security features of the sandbox. Instead a dedicated minimum security account should be used to block the process from accessing anything outside the sandbox.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Email router on Windows Server 2008 R2

A customer of mine is running CRM 4 in IFD mode on a Windows Server 2008 R2 and I thought it might be a good idea to activate the Email router and talk to them about sending mail using that instead of the internal email handler to reduce the need for them to be online with their Outlooks for things to work.

Well, as usually I set up the email router on the CRM-server but was baffled when I couldn't connect to it. I just got this weird error of 401 Unauthorized error. I tried everthing, changing the users, adding the user to the privusergroup, changing the ADWebApplicationRootDomain. After some googling I found the solution on this excellent blog.
http://crmwizard.blogspot.com/2010/02/server-2008-and-email-router-with-ifd.html

It turned out that the server was using IPv6 to access itself and the onpremise exceptions set up in the IFD settings were only based on IPv4 hence it tried to access it in the IFD mode. I just switched IPv6 off in the network adpater and everything worked as it should.

If you speak swedish, there are some interesting discussions on http://www.crmforum.se/, the only Swedish CRM-forum dedicated to Dynamics CRM. So head over there and digg in!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

CRM 2011 Online and datawarehousing

I attended a half day presentation by Microsoft yesterday on the subject of Dynamics CRM 2011 and integrations. It seems that many parterners are a bit hesistant to integrating Dynamics CRM 2011 Online and are promoting the on-premise versions when the issues of integration are important.

Microsoft did a good job in showing that they do have sufficient technology to handle integrations to Dynamics CRM 2011 Online including the Azure based technology ACS - Access Control System that together with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 can be used to allow Dynamics CRM 2011 Online to use a local AD as authenticator. It is probably not as easy as setting up a normal on-premise solution but at least it can be done and there hopefully are some whitepapers or Youtube-clips on how it is done.

One of the issues that were discussed was the issue of integrations in reagards to Business Intelligence and data warehousing. This is usually done using SQL Integration Service (SSIS) with direct SQL communication. Their suggestion on how to address this issue was to use the new OData interface that exists in Dynamics CRM 2011. I am no SQL expert but I do believe that this being a standardized protocol, integrations will be possible. However, there will still be issues with performance as the amounts of data that need to be transfered are quite large and the OData protocol is still a strict pull-protocol which does not allow for trigger-based updates.

Another issue that I asked about was the licensing issue in regards to Dynamics CRM 2011 Online. Take the following example: A large company of about 40 000 employees has about 500 people activly working in with Dynamics CRM 2011 Online for SalesForceAutomation. A data warehouse is created and data is integrated from many different systems, ERP, production systems, quality control systems and CRM. CRM being the customer data master. SharePoint is used as the global Intranet platform and some of the data from the data warehouse is published on the SharePoint portal to all employees. For instance our currently 10 most important customers. So, the 39 500 employees are only viewing a minute part of the customer data, and it indirecty, via the data warehouse, originates from the CRM system. What licenses in CRM are required for these users?

In the case of an on-premise installation, the best licensing option for Dynamics CRM is the Application Platform Agreement (APA) that is sort of a "free-for-all pass" which is negotiated with Microsoft. However, in the Online environment there is no correlating licensing agreement to the APA. I explicitly asked Micrsoft how this was to be licensed and their answer is that 40 000 separate users licenses are required for Dynamics CRM 2011 Online, making it a rather impossible option, in other words forcing the company to either an on-premise solution, removing some of the data from the data warehouse/Intranet or moving to another CRM supplier. Neither of which is in line with showing off the power of Microsofts cloud services.

I hope this is just a temporary flaw since it does limit Microsofts business opportunities with larger companies and I would think it is probable that some similar agreement form that matches the on-premise APA will be introduced.

On the other hand, the External Connector license is not required at all for CRM Online (or SPLA) making it even more interesting for smaller CRM customers as customer/event/portal integrations are more and more common.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Installing CRM 4.0 on Windows Server 2008 (R2)

Windows Server 2008 (R2) brings a lot of new and nice features. IIS 7 being one of them and fact that you need to install the features you want to use also makes it more slim and generally better.

However, it does add some extra complexity to installing Dynamics CRM since it requires some components. The installation check that Dynamics CRM runs during installation is not complete in this aspect either and it misses out on some critical components.

I am preparing a virtual machine for a customer of mine and it came with everything installed, but not verified. The Dyn CRM installation did not work. After some checking I found that the following role services were missng:

Static Content Handler
Windows Authentication

and I also added

Digest Authentication and
Static Content Compression

Also the SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) was configured to run with an Execution Account, which I found on some bloggs was erroneous. This is not strange since SSRS with Dynamics CRM is designed for sending the user credentials all the way to the SQL-server, which means that SSRS must impersonate the user. So I disabled this.

After fixing these issues, the best way forward is to reinstall Dyn CRM since trying to fix a faulty installation is a lot harder and takes a lot more time. If you have data that you need, try reinstalling and then redeploying the database.

I am also using VirtuaBox as virtualization and I strongly advise against using the snapshot functionality, it seems very unstable.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Javascript in CRM 2011 - lots of new stuff

CRM 2011 brings lots of new technology, one of the areas being web resources, a very longed for area where general resources like webpages, javascript libraries and silverlight applications can be uploaded in a general area and then selected in certain areas.

Microsoft have also revised the javascript framework for CRM 2011 and it brings a lot of enhancments and and some old stuff has been depracated, but still works.

I found a very interesting grid at this blog: http://inogic.blogspot.com/2011/02/difference-between-crm-40-and-crm2011.html

I have referenced it directly for your pleasure bellow, click it to view it in full size:

Great thanks to the guys behind it at Inogic. A great help!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

www.crmforum.se

We have longed for a local Swedish forum dedicated to only Microsoft Dynamics CRM where both consultants, experts, trainers and users can create a community and discuss issues concerning Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Not as big as the official forum hosted by Microsoft, but smaller, in Swedish and maybe a bit more friendly! That is why we have created http://www.crmforum.se/, the Swedish forum for the Dynamics CRM community in Sweden and Scandinavia. So if you are working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and like to communicate in Swedish, join us. There are no adds and no fees.

http://www.crmforum.se/

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

CRM 2011 is now fully released

Now it is finally here in full! The new, brilliant version of our favorite product, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. If you havn't already tried it, there is no time to loose! Click the link bellow and start downloading:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c3f82c6f-c123-4e80-b9b2-ee422a16b91d

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

My first apperance as guest blogger

I have been asked by the very well renowned blog at Software Advice, to write a guest post and you can now read it at their site: Software Advice. It is a post concerning the legal problems of cloud based systems and where its data is stored. It is most uncertain which laws apply to the data, and the most probable outcome is that it will be viewed as subject to the country where it is stored. Something that might not always be beneficial to companies and organizations with sensitive data.

Please read it and leave your comment on the subject, it would be very interesting to read your view on the subject. I personally think it is very interesting and that it is one of the aspects of cloud computing that I feel often is neglected by companies.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

CRM 2011 IFD

Internet Facing Deployment is one of the most important features of Dynamics CRM 4 and will be so for CRM 2011 aswell. It is the enabler for real multitennancy environments and for accessing Dynamics CRM from the Internet.

As I mentioned previously, in CRM 2011 there have been some major changes to this feature as it is now based on Claims based authentication. I tried setting this up for the Beta release but the AD Federation Services 2.0 requirements were a bit over my head.

Well, Microsoft acknowledged this and have now released a video on how to set this up and they mentioned it on the CRM Team blog aswell.

I havn't tried it yet, but videos are an excellent way of learning how to do these things since you can pause, rewind and do it one step at a time.

If you have any experience of setting up IFD for CRM 2011, please drop a comment.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Need to approve email addresses in CRM 2011

As we are running CRM 2011 as dogfood, I found an interesting new feature of CRM 2011. When adding a new user, you have to approve their email for it to work properly, for instance in Outlook where you otherwise will get an error saying that the sending user does not have an email address.

So, if you get this error, just add an email address and press the "Approve Email" button in the ribbon.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Interesting blog article on Microsofts Dynamics in the cloud

The Cloud is hot. Everybody seems to be talking cloud computing like it is the holy grail of computing. I try to have a bit more cold headed view of it since I am often faced with the complexities of integrating systems with each other, I often find that it can be very complex to integrate two systems residing in machines next to each other, adding a level of complexity by placing these machines on the internet does make integration more complex and costly.

The cloud does have its advantages though, for smaller companies, like my own, there is no need to own and run large servers. We, at CRM-Konsulterna, do not run any servers at all. The one server that we actually need, our lab environment, is actually hosted aswell, but on a infrastructure level.

I was tipped by Software Advice about an interesting article on Microsofts push on cloud computing for Microsoft Dynamics. You can read it here: http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/accounting/microsoft-is-all-in-for-the-cloud-but-what-about-dynamics-1121310/. It addresses some quite interesting points from a Dynamics perspective, not only CRM.

I think that you need to understand the background in order to understand why Microsoft are pushing this so hard. The traditional on-premise deployment type of systems has always been Microsofts strongest area and Microsoft has for several reasons, like risk reduction, scalability etc. to have a business that is partner based. It is also heavily focused on adressing the IT part of customers business, which is natural when coming from their background.

The recent years have shown that companies like Google and SalesForce.com deliver very competent cloud based services and this seriously endagers Microsofts core business model since it shortcuts Microsoft offers by adressing the business decions makers directly and circomventing the IT-departments. This is a outspoken stragegy for companies like SalesForce.com.

So, what Microsoft tries to do is to compete on the cloud market and the on-premise market at the same time while still trying to hold on to their partner network and maintain their loyalty. This is of course quite complicated since many Microsoft partners have made a living by installing and selling Microsoft software. There are new models for cloud based service reselling but it does feel like there is going to be a bit of a downside for many partners.

From our perspective, as CRM-consultants, we are happy to offer CRM in any flavor since our main businesses is not selling the licenses but around helping our customers leverage the power of the system by adapting it to their needs. Hence it does not really matter if it on-premise or in the cloud.

However, from a technical perspective, we do recommend either partner hosted or on-premise since that substantially reduces the pains of integrations and adaptions compared to a Microsoft hosted solution. So, our recommendation to our customers is usually to choose partner hosted as that relieves  them of the burden of managing the server etc. and at the same time gives us all the advantages of adapting the system to their needs.

The fact that Hunter Richards mentions about the different architectures of the Dynamics ERP products is true but does not really affect Microsoft CRM since it has a good Cloud platform, even though there are some adaptations that only can be done on on-premise or partner hosted systems, it is a very competent and flexible Cloud system and the new version CRM 2011 is even better.

It will also be interesting to see how Microsoft will mange the partner channel in the future. It is something they, with their current business model cannot do without but at the same time something that slows them down a bit since partners naturally are slower to move than inhouse consultants.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

CRM 2011 Release Candidate and installation

As most of you dedicated CRM nerds most certainly already know, the Release Candidate for CRM 2011 has been released.

As we at CRM-Konsulterna want to act as we preach, we have of course installed it and are now trying it out.

We are a small company and do not yet have an AD except one for our development environments on our virtual server host that we rent. So, our computers are not part of the domain that the CRM resides in.

An interesting thing about the Outlook client installation was that when we tested the connection, it worked just fine, but when trying to press the OK button in the configuration wizard, it just complained with the following error message "The server address (URL) is not valid.".

After some digging, I found that the reason was that the stored URL that the discovery service returns is actually the computer name, and since our working computers arn't part of the CRM:s AD, it couldn't find it.

The simple fix is to add an entry in the local hosts file located in "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts" (if you installed windows to C:\Windows of course).

There is probably some entry in the database, where this is located as well, I had a quick look but didn't find it. If you know where, please let me know. The registry serverurl in the MSCRM key does not seem to be right. At least it does not change the webservice http://www.blogger.com/s displayed in the customizations pages of CRM.

CRM 2011 looks and feels, really good, there are some minor buggs but it is a large step from CRM 4 which is a very good application as well.


Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Customer databases and Wikileaks

The latest news concerning wikileaks have some very important implications on CRM systems or xRM systems in general for that matter. How do you set the system up to avoid large information losses? There are some general things to be taken into consideration and some specifics for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

For many companies, the list of customers, cases, interesting leads and business opportunities are among the most critical information the company has. If it gets into the wrong hands, the effects can be anything from embarssing to fatal. The latest weeks news concerning wikileaks has put this risk into some new light and it is a good time for companies to really put the right focus on this and handle the problem before it is too late. A competent CRM system like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, can, if security issues have not be properly addressed, be a great tool to very quickly export a lot of very business critical information.

There are some general tips that you really should address:

- How critical is the data? Which data is the most critical? Try to focus on the most important data instead of trying to set up fine masked security to cover all data. This will give you a bigger bang for the buck and also get the changes up and running quickly. Remember the fact that the chains often breaks at the weakest link, so focus on this link first.

- What legal aspects of the data do you have? Do all employees sign non-disclosure agreements and do they understand the severity of actually taking along some data to a competitor. In reality it is very hard to drive legal actions based on this but making sure all employees have understood the severity, will act proactivly to reduce the risk.

- Who can access the data? Usually not only the employees, IT-consultants, CRM- and ERP-consultants, and other contracted people might also have access.Trying to reduce the number of contractors, and signing company global NDA:s with contractors is usually a good idea.
 
- Where is the data stored? In these cloud computing times, this is not always a simple question. Data might be stored in a country with very rigid anti-terrorist or anti-piracy laws allowing government or other agencies to demand access to the data. If these government agencies judge that it be in their contrys best interest to send this information forward, this might also be done. Might sound a bit paranoid, but security policy is more about being paranoid than being naive. I would recommed hosting the system yourself or at a local partner. Preferably a partner of similar size to your own company since this will give you the same amount of flexibility and beaurocracy. This local partner will also be under the same national laws as your own company and have a more intimate relationship with your business than a huge corporation with a global hosting service.
 
- What is the weak link in the handling of data? It does not really matter if the CRM system in the cloud has astronomical encryption in the database and data transfers, if the people using the system have the same password in the CRM system as they have in all other online services like Facebook or Hotmail. Numerous examples have shown that people do share passwords between sites, and that cracking one site usually unlocks a lot more. An example can be a person using the same password for their local childcare portal as they do for their CRM at the global company they work for. The simple childcare portal, might be easily hacked with normal methods like SQL-injection and the passwords generated from this can then be used to access the global company CRM.
 
There are still more general principles to follow, I will not list them all here, if you have any you find particulary important, please leave a comment!
 
So, how do we handle this in Microsoft Dynamics CRM? There are several techniques that can be used but it is a constant battle between giving your users the power to really work with the data and making sure that the data is safe. Bellow are some of the more common ways of handling this:
 
- Security Roles and business units. The basic security architeture of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is really versatile and has very good support for separating users and data into different business units and then setting user roles to restrict access based on these business units. For instance, a team of telesales personell with a very high turnover of employees, can be set to only have read and write access to their own customers and opportunities and their team manager has the task of delegating the ownership of leads or opportunities to them. By using different roles, the senior sales team can on the other hand have access to all customers and business opportunities in the system. If a good separation of data can be done based on business units and security roles, this is a very good method since it is easy to set up and change, and still has very deep functionality in Dynamics CRM, going all the way down to the Filtered Views in the Dynamics CRM SQL-database.

- Disabling Excel export. Probably the most risky function in Dynamics CRM in regards to data theft from employees, is the Excel button. It can export any data the user has access to. There is a flag in the security roles, where this function can be switched off. It should be for all but powerusers, analysts and management.

- Limiting Excel export size. There is a way of manipulating the Dynamics CRM database to only allow a certain amount of rows in an excel export. As I have understood it, it is really a way of easing the load on the server and not really meant as a means of protecting data. It can only be set on a system wide way, which will limit the use of Excel for all users. You can read more about it in this blog entry, have a look in the comments, since it tells you how to set this for CRM 4. http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2006/11/maximum-amount-of-records-in-excel.html

- Custom Plugin code. Writing code that uses more complex functionality and filters the data can also be used. It need to trigger on the Retrieve, RetrieveMultiple and Execute methods. This is of course the moste versatile method. Even though it can be used to filter data that is accessed from the Dynamics CRM GUI it does not affect the Filtered Views in the database, so it is not a 100% solution but will work in most cases.

- Unsupported customizations. There is of course the dark side of customizations as well, by rewriting the database with new stored procedures, views, by modifying the existing CRM functionality, very deep changes can be made. This is not something I recommend since it will usually require deep reverse engineering and will seriously affect the upgradablity of the Dynamics CRM system.

This is a complex area and I would be happy to discuss it with you. Please leave a comment with your views on the subject. All comments are moderated to avoid spam.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/

Lecturer at certification preparation courses

CRM-Konsulterna and Informator, have agreed on a partnership and as part of this I will be one of their regular Dynamics CRM lecturers. Since Microsoft are changing their partnership program, with a lot more focus on certification requirements, we are kicking off with two certification preparation courses for the Application and the Customization exam. If the interest is good, we will most certainly arrange courses in Installation & Configuration and Extending Dynamics CRM as well. Later on we are also planning some Microsoft Official Dynamics CRM courses, both CRM 4.0 and CRM 2011.

So, make sure that you and you consultants are up to speed and join me for an instructive and very hands-on course that will certainly prepare you for the types of questions you will be facing in the exam.

The courses will be held at Informator in Stockholm, but if you have interest in attending a course in some other place, please let me or Informator know and we'll see what we can do!

At the following links you can read some more about the courses:
CRM 4.0 Application

CRM 4.0 Customization


Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/

Importing organizations with custom reports

The import organization tool is very useful for setting up test or development environements with full production level data. However, I ran into a problem importing today, when importing the organization, I got the following fatal error:

System.InvalidOperationException: ExecuteNonQuery requires an open and available Connection. The connection's current state is closed.

After a bit of googling I found that this had been discussed in the CRM forums: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/crmdeployment/thread/53c616e8-c454-48ec-9962-759071a82358

Since I imported the organization, mainly to work with duplicates processing, I just removed all custom reports from the CRM database manually and the import went just fine.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

CRM 2011 and Internet Facing Deployment

I have now had the time to look quite a bit at CRM 2011 beta and it looks really good. The Dynamics CRM team at Microsoft have been really busy.

One of the features I really liked about CRM 4 was Internet Facing Deployment. It opens a lot of doors and my current company offers it quite a lot.

I had a look at this feature in CRM 2011 beta and it is both a really interesting feature and a disappointment. It is based on a completely new architecure, called Claims based authentication which allows any type of authenticator to authenticate users for Dynamics CRM. For example, LinkedIn, Facebook or Windows Live ID could be used to authenticate user in Dynamics CRM.

This is really interesting since it allows for many types of authentication providers, even custom made. However, since the technique is a bit more complex than the old IFD technology in CRM 4.0 it will also require some more configuring. As far as I have understood it is for instance dependant on Active Directory Federation Service 2.0.

I tried setting it up correctly in CRM 2011 beta in a demo environment, with a set up similar to CRM 4.0 with authentication using the AD, which I believe probably still will be mostly used (maybe Live Id will be used quite a lot as well) but after a couple of hours felt that my skills in Active Directory in Windows Server 2008 R2, Federation Service 2.0 and the more technical details of claims based authentication have some rather large white areas, I left it alone.

It is a very interesting technique and I hope that there will be good how-tos around for how to set this up correctly, most preferably a wizard or two, for AD and Live Id authentication.

Another interesting aspect of this is the legacy support of IFD customizations from CRM 4.0. Since this technique is quite different from how this is handled in CRM 4.0, I wonder how Microsoft are going to create full legacy support for old applications, since they are within the "supported" framework which according to Microsofts promises, should mean they are auto-upgradable.

If you have anything to add on this subject, feel free to add a comment. Especially if you know of a good instruction of how to set this up correctly! 

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

External Connector for SPLA/Hosted CRM

Many of my customers are aquiring Dynamics CRM through the Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) which more commonly is known as Partner Hosted. We are working closely with Hermelin IT-Partner (http://www.hermelin.com/) for this service as they are an excellent provider of IT-infrastructure.

One of the licensing issues I have been discussing with Hermelin IT-Partner and Crayon, a Swedish Microsoft Licensing specialist partner, is how the External Connector is licensed for SPLA.

The External Connector is, as many of you probably know, a special license that is required to license external users to work with data in Dynamics CRM, without working with the normal GUI (requires full license). Despite the name, it just a license form and does not contain any code at all.

Typical scenarios where the external connector is required is for customer portals, case registrations by customers etc. where the portal or other software works directly with the CRM webservice or database. I have had extensive discussions with Microsoft concerning implicit information, like data warehouses and how these are to be licensed but have as of now only got the answer that as long as there is some interaction with the data, like drill-down, a license is required. If there are many users, the Application Platform Agreement is what is recommended. The external connector cannot be used in internal scenarios as it explicitly only gives accessrights to non-employees and the similar.

For an on premise solution, the external connector is typically priced in the area of €25 000 or $30 000 which is quite hefty and a very large pricetag for a small company making it more or less impossible to buy.

So, when working with Dynamics CRM licensed in SPLA, how does the license agreement work? Crayon sent us the following sections concerning this:

For Dynamics CRM 4.0 Service Provider :

You do not need a SAL for external users who access Dynamics CRM 4.0 without using Dynamics CRM 4.0 Client for Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web Client software.  External users means users that are not (i) a customer’s or a customer’s affiliates’ employees, or (ii) a customer’s or a customer’s affiliates’ contractors and agents.

So, surprise, you don't need it at all! This is something I think is great since that really opens up the possibilities of really leveraging the full power of Dynamics CRM for our customers even the smallest with only a couple of users.

It also has some other implications, namely that a customer that currently licenses Dynamics CRM as on-premise via Volume Licensing or by renting the licenses and currently are using the external connector, really should start looking at moving to partner hosted since that will remove the quite hefty cost of the external connector. It typically also comes with a SA of about 1/3 the cost per year so it is an ongoing cost.

I hope that Microsoft will be harmonizing this with the rest of the "power of choice" so that it will be more reasonably priced also for on-premise solutions.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/

Dublicate detection window too small...

Had an interesting error reported by a customer today. It seems that in the Swedish version of CRM 4.0 the duplicate detection window showing found duplicates is too small. You cannot see the buttons:

This is a bit trick to fix since this form is not customizable and I think the only supported way of actually fixing it is changing the amount of text at the top by exporting the tags.

There is, however, a very small unsupported change that you can do that will enable the scrollbars which will allow you to scroll down to see and press the buttons.

Open the file: CRMWeb/Tools/DuplicateDetection/ViewDuplicates/ViewDuplicates.aspx

and edit the tag to instead. It will give the following result:

Which will allow the user to scroll down and see and press the buttons.

The risks of this unsupported fix is that it might be overwritten in update rollups, but it would destroy anything and there are no risks when upgrading to 2011.

I really would like Microsoft to fix this bugg though...

If anyone has some other solution to this, that is supported, please leave a comment.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Publishing reports for external use

Recently I have been working quite a lot with reports and I must say that the new GUI in Reportdesigner for SQL RS 2008 is really a nice facelift.

I have been working with autogenerating reports as PDF:s as I have previously blogged about. It is a bit more complex to do in SQL Server 2005 and later since you have to work with two webservices that have similar class names, which I must say is a real stroke of genius. If there is interest, I might be looking into writing some about this.

An interesting thing I noticed about this is that despite the fact that the report previously has been published for external use, each update of the report will require you to republish it in order for the changes to stick. You can otherwise get some really interesting inconsistencies.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Problem with installing CRM on machine with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 installed

I was setting up a VPC today and during the checks I got the following error:
"ASP.NET 2.0 is not installed"

Very weird. I had it installed and I tried repairing the installation and running aspnet_regiis -i on the ASP.NET 2.0 framework. After some googling I found that this was due to Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 installed and this excellent blog explaining what was wrong and how to fix it. I did, however, have to remove the ISAPI filter for .NET Framework 4.0. Check it out here:

http://crm.vdsnickt.eu/2010/05/ms-crm-4-0-setup-error-asp-net-is-not-installed/

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

New webpage for CRM-Konsulterna

The work with starting the new company is coming along fine. We recently launched the new website where we tell everyone who'd like to know I bit more about the company and what we offer.

It is currently available only in Swedish, but Google Translate will probably work if you really want to read it and feel a bit weak on the Swedish.

We will try to attract the best Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultants in Sweden and hope to build a very interesting company where we can all excel and really bring value to our customers.

Please have a look! http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/

IFD on Windows Server 2008 R2 problem with plugin registration

A customers system I was working on today has just been reconfigured to and IFD setup. The server is a Windows Server 2008 R2 and I had made sure that it worked on port 80 with NTLM/AD internally. However, when I tried to connect the plugin registration wizard in the normal manner, it just gave me an error:

"Request IP Address has different address family from network address."

I found and interesting thread on Egghead café where some guys had run in to the same problem.
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/31655329/-crm-4-on-2008-server--ipv6-related-problem.aspx

So I did as they suggested, added the servername to the hosts-file to the IP 127.0.0.1. If you don't know what this means, it works as a local DNS. The IP 127.0.0.1 is assigned to always be the local computer and "localhost" is usually directed to this adress. You can try by browsing to it if you havn't tried.

The hosts file can be found in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts. There are usually an entry or two in there so you can usually figure it out, the syntax is simple:

127.0.0.1 servername

If you tried pinging the servername before doing this, you would get the IP v6 address, after doing this, you will get an answer from 127.0.0.1 and after confirming this, you should have no problems getting it up and running.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Focus to give value

I am currently in the middle of the blizzard of getting the company I am starting, up and running, taking care of all the customers we are moving from Hermelin IT-Partner, managing all the administration and so on. For us, you and me, who work with CRM, a customer centric approach should be obvious, so the customers are of course first why the webpage is still a bit slim.

One of my strong visions for the company is to be very focused. We will focus on the market leading CRM system, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and no other CRM systems or other systems at all. It is a very dynamics system and the possibilities are endless. On top of that there are huge numbers of third party products available and the only way of giving customers the best possible recommendations and services on how to adapt the CRM system and which 3:rd party product will give the customer the best bang for the buck is to focus. It is hard enough with just such a huge system as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, that working with more than it is just not possible.

Lauren Carlson at Software advice has assembled a list of their 15 favorite verticalizations for Microsoft Dynmaics CRM. It a good list to have in the back of you head when speaking to customers, why invent the the wheel twice? Have a look at it here: http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/microsoft-dynamics-crm-industry-solutions-our-20-favorites-1082010/ . These most certainly will give your customers a bigger bang for the buck.


Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/

Working with language translations and Dynamics CRM

I was recently preparing a demo for a potential customer here in Sweden, my last task at Logica, a company I am now leaving, which is a bit sad since I like the company and most especially my colleageus there.

When preparing this demo I was working with an english version of CRM but the demo was to be all in Swedish and the potential customer was a state-owned company which does all it's work in Swedish. Hence I needed to translate some of the customizations I had made and I had also used the eService accelerator and need to translate this aswell.

I hadn't actually done any translations previously, it had always been my colleagues doing this and it was a good lesson.

I exported the translations, opened the zip and started working with the translations in the xml. Wrong... despite the fact that it is xml it is actually an Excel document and I hadn't read that part and since my CRM server didn't have Excel installed, I didn't see the icon you can see when you do have Excel installed.

So, I was using Visual Studio to edit the translations and it was a bit of a hassle since it was quite a large document and visual studio didn't really like it.

Well, after some time I noticed that it had some tags saying it was an Excel document. So, I opened it in Excel and voilà a lot easier to work with. So, just a suggestion, don't do the same misstake and sometimes, RTFM.

Another thing I found was that it was a bit hard finding the  right attributes in the rather large list and the solution was quite simple. When adding an attribute and entering the english display name, I added a string at the end, for instance "GWCRM". I could then use this as a search string in Excel when editing it, to find the correct displaynames to change. And when adding the swedish translation, I removed the "GWCRM" part at the end of the English.

This is the last day at Logica, all my best to my wonderful colleagues here and I wish you all the best of luck with your future business!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se