CRM Diag Tool

Want do check how a CRM installation is? Have a look at CRM Diag Tool at this webpage: http://blogs.msdn.com/benlec/archive/2007/06/06/new-crmdiagtoolturbo-3-0-5300-060607-uploaded-06-06-07.aspx

It helps you analyze a CRM installation. I havn't tried it yet but when I have I will tell you some more. I wrote this post just in case you didn't know it existed (like me).

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

CRM with MapPoint

Integrating a map service into MS CRM with mesh-up technology is not very hard and can add very strong functionality to the users/customer. I havn't worked in a project yet that wanted this functionality which is the reason why I havn't blogged about it.

However, today I had a look at the CRM Team blog and found that Ayaz Ahmad, a CRM MVP has written a blog entry on how to make a simple CRM integration with Microsoft Mappoint.

Please have a look here if you are interested:
http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2007/06/14/microsoft-dynamics-crm-and-mappoint-integration-a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words.aspx

I am not sure how well MapPoint works in Europe/Northern Europe but I don't think integration with Google Earth (sorry MS, I know you hate them :) or other similar services (www.hitta.se, www.eniro.se) is very much harder as long as the do have a wsdl-webservice that can easily be consumed, or can easily be configured using URL-parameters.

Anyway, start off with MapPoint, if it doesn't go all the way for you, try working with some other Map Service supplier. There might also be some nice ActiveX-based map-service if a better map GUI is needed.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

New CRM VPC

Well, my daughter is sleeping so I have some time to blog a bit and read some other blogs.

The so-called May-VPC containing a CRM Demo environment will soon be out-dated and a couple of guys are working on a new environment. It will contain SharePoint 2007, VS 2005 and a lot more which is good news, since it therefore can be used for demos, education and simple development projects (larger development projects should be based on an empty CRM, with some customer specific data). I am looking forward to it! Read a bit more about it on Mennotk's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/mscrmfreak/archive/2007/06/12/new-microsoft-dynamics-crm-vpc-update.aspx

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Off topic: I am now a father!

17:03 on the 12:th of june, my wife gave birth to my first child, a beautiful little girl! She has been named Liv Nora Hogseth Westerlund, Nora being her primary name.

So, if you find this blog to be a bit slow the next few weeks, please have a look at the pictures at my private website www.westerlund.info, and you will understand why this is so.

Gustaf Westerlund
Father & CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

How to customize search in SharePoint

Patrick Tissegheim, a very competent SharePoint MVP at U2U has made a very good video presentation of how to customize search in SharePoint. He works with the tabbed searching and shows how to create your own search page, search result page and how to use SharePoint Designer GUI to create the XSLT used to show the result of a search. Very nice, if you havn't seen it, you should.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb428855.aspx

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

SharePoint links

Looking for some good links to SharePoint related material, have a look bellow:

SharePoint whitepapers:
http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads%202007.htm

Office SharePoint Server 2007 on TechNet
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/5233cf43-6a8f-40cb-9014-0724600e7e381033.mspx?mfr=true

Microsoft Office Systems for Architects
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/sv-se/architecture/aa699381.aspx

Application Templates
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/wssapps/templates/datasheets.mspx

I will publish more when I find anything useful!


Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Dynamics on MSDN

Dynamics (the product family of which CRM is part), now has it's own corner in MSDN. Please have a look:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/default.aspx

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Reports.config has invalid schema

I was working with setting up a demo/lab environment with SQL 2005, MOSS Ent 2007 and MS CRM 3, Office 2007 Ultimate.

However, I had problems getting the reports to work, when trying to access the reportpage, I got the error: "Reports.config has invalid schema".

I looked around a bit on the net and found that one of the blogs I suibscribe to actually discussed the problem at hand.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mscrmfreak/archive/2006/05/17/599371.aspx

It seemed that the reason for the error was that .NET 2.0 had been defaultet for the CRM 3 website (and we all know it is .NET 1.1, right!). So, tried to run "aspnet_regiis -r" as described but I got the same error as the comment by "Matt Thomas", my CRM just stopped working.

So, what to do. I found that when you run "aspnet_regiis -r" it resetts all websites to the version of .NET that you run it from (ex. C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_regiis -r, will set all websites to use .NET 1.1). This is not desirable since my MOSS 2007, SQL 2005 RS and all MOSS admin sites (central admin, my site, SSP) all should run .NET 2.0. So, I thought it better to reset all sites to .NET 2.0 and then manually set the CRM site to 1.1. And so I did, and CRM just stalled when loading. No error message, no nothn'!

This got me thinking that you should be able to run one version of aspnet_regiis for just one website. So, by trying the all-usefull "/?" parameter I found that using "aspnet_regiis -lk" will list all different IIS-paths and show which version they were running. This was what I found:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322>aspnet_regiis -lk
W3SVC/ 2.0.50727.42W3SVC/1/ROOT/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/1/ROOT/_layouts/images/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/1/ROOT/_layouts/inc/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/131316714/root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/131316714/root/Reports/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/131316714/root/ReportServer/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/1720207907/root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/2/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.0
W3SVC/2/ROOT/MSCRMServices/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/2075257487/Root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/2075257487/Root/_layouts/images/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/2075257487/Root/_layouts/inc/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/425288717/Root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/425288717/Root/_layouts/images/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/425288717/Root/_layouts/inc/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/493651791/Root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/493651791/Root/_layouts/images/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/493651791/Root/_layouts/inc/ 2.0.50727.42

Aha! Can you see what is wrong? Well, when I manually set CRM to .NET 1.1 it didn't do that recursivly! The CRM webservice is running as a separate application, and I hadn't changed that. This is the row that shows what's wrong:

W3SVC/2/ROOT/MSCRMServices/ 2.0.50727.42

So, I checked what parameters you could use with aspnet_regiis and found that "-s " seemed like a good idea. Hence, I ran:

aspnet_regiis -s W3SVC/2/ROOT

I think it might just have worked with going in to the CRM site and changing it for the MSCRMService virtual directory, but I thought it better to set it to the entire MS CRM 3 website recursivly to make sure everything was ok. When it had completed (takes a minute or two), I ran "aspnet_regiis -lk" again to check the current status:

W3SVC/ 2.0.50727.42W3SVC/1/ROOT/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/1/ROOT/_layouts/images/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/1/ROOT/_layouts/inc/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/131316714/root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/131316714/root/Reports/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/131316714/root/ReportServer/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/1720207907/root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/2/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.0
W3SVC/2/ROOT/MSCRMServices/ 1.1.4322.0
W3SVC/2075257487/Root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/2075257487/Root/_layouts/images/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/2075257487/Root/_layouts/inc/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/425288717/Root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/425288717/Root/_layouts/images/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/425288717/Root/_layouts/inc/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/493651791/Root/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/493651791/Root/_layouts/images/ 2.0.50727.42
W3SVC/493651791/Root/_layouts/inc/ 2.0.50727.42

As you can see, the MSCRMService is now also .NET 1.1.

After this I restarted the IIS with "iisreset", and tried to run CRM and the reports;
Everything worked as it should!

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

SQL Server 2008

Microsoft are planning to release a new version of SQL Server next year that will be called Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

It hosts lots of new features, for instance the ability to work directly with entities in the database instead of tables and views. An interesting feature, I wonder how good it will be.

SQL Reports will also be better and the integration with MS Office system (=SharePoint?) has be enhanced.

Have a look at Microsofts website for SQL Server 2008 for more information and some videos.

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/futureversion/default.mspx

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

MOM Pack

Microsoft Operations Management (or similar programs) is a program that every serious IT-department runns to make sure all servers, clients and applications run as they should. Microsoft has release a MOM-pack for CRM so, if you want to monitor what CRM is or isn't doing, I suggest you have a look at it!

http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2007/06/01/released-microsoft-dynamics-crm-3-server-management-pack-for-mom-2005.aspx

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Backup of SharePoint

Backing up SharePoint is not just backing up the databases and hoping for the best. Best Practice is actually using the tool stsadm and create backupfiles that can be then be backed up to tape (or similar). So, how to create a script that takes backup?

Example of script for catastrophic backup:
@echo offecho start Catastrophic backup >> backup.log
date /t >> backup.log
time /t >> backup.log
"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\stsadm" -o backup -directory \\srv01\Backup\CatastrophicBackup -backupmethod full >> backup.log
date /t >> backup.log
time /t >> backup.log
echo end Catastropic backup >> backup.log

This will create a new folder in the directory \\srv01\Backup\CatastrophicBackup where backup of all databases will be done.

However, the problem with this is that you can't restore just one file... so what to do?
Two alternatives:
1. Just export all site data to file using "stsadm -o export", and when needed, restore to secondary sharepoint (not public) and retrieve file.
2. Use 3:rd party backup solution like DocAve 4.1 by AvePoint that has single-item-restore.

An example of how to uses stsadm for creating a normal export is:

stsadm -o export -url http://portal -filename "\\srv1\Backup\portal.bak" -version 4

This will export everything from http://portal to \\srv1\backup\portal.bak including all versions of all files. Please note that if you have lots of data, it might take som time to do this.

Note that there is also a version of "stsadm -o backup" that backs up entire sitecollections but for "simpler" backup set ups I don't find that necessary.

Also note that this is how you handle backup for smaller installations where you can acctually run an export of all data each night. For larger installations, more complex backup methods based on incremental backup or snapshotting can be used.

Since we're using sharepoint for backing up, we don't really have any need for maintaining transactionlogs in SQL server som make sure you have selected "Simple Recovery Model" for each SharePoint database.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

CRM BizTalk Adaptor - How To

As you might be aware, there is a BizTalk Adaptor for Microsoft CRM 3. I havn't spoken to anyone who has tried it but I just found a nice blog that describes a lot about how to set it up. It is focused for BizTalk experts, but can be very helpful to get a BizTalk CRM integration project started. Have a look and judge for your self:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brajens/archive/2007/05/27/using-microsoft-biztalk-dynamics-crm-adapter-part-1.aspx

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se