November 2006 - Posts
Microsoft has just released their first rollup for CRM 3.0. It will contain all the hotfixes and updates. The announcement says:
CRM Update Rollup 1 applicability to CRM 3.0 Sales for Outlook compatibility with Windows Vista and Office 2007
CRM 3.0 Update Rollup 1 does not provide compatibility with CRM 3.0 Sales for Outlook compatibility with Windows Vista and Office 2007. Contact Customer Support Services regarding availability of a CRM 3.0 Sales for Outlook compatible with Windows Vista and Office 2007.
Availability of CHS (Chinese - PRC) and JPN (Japanese - Japan) versions of CRM Update Rollup 1
Chinese and Japanese versions of CRM 3.0 Update Rollup 1 are not available, but are under consideration
Update Rollup 1 dependencies regarding export and import of customizations
When customizations were exported from a Microsoft CRM 3.0 server running Update Rollup 1, importing the customizations to a Microsoft CRM 3.0 server that does not have Update Rollup 1 installed is not supported. Such an attempt will produce an error message such as “The selected schema file does not conform with the requested format. There has been an error with the schema validation in line 37977, position 16.” When attempting to import customizations to your CRM Server that were exported from a CRM Server running Update Rollup 1, make sure the CRM Server to which you are importing the customizations also has Update Rollup 1 installed.
Hotfixes and updates that you have to manually enable or configure
Update Rollup 1 contains hotfixes and updates that you have to manually enable or configure. To enable or configure these hotfixes on the server that is running Microsoft CRM 3.0, consult the "Hotfixes and updates that you have to manually enable or configure" section of
The rollup and KB article are available at:
Microsoft Download Center: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=08BADB01-4984-458E-96E6-4F08622CFE63&displaylang=en
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922815
Thanks to CRM MVP Aaron Elder and Greg Nichols, Microsoft CRM Sustained Engineering for bringing this information to our attention. I have not yet had a chance to download and install the rollup but be sure I will. I'll let you know how it goes.
The last couple of days I have been setting up a new Small Business Server for a client. All has gone well except for a couple of client computers. One of which, of course, is the owner's. Try as I may, I was unable to get them to properly join the SBS domain. They were not able to ping themselves although they were able to ping the server. And they couldn't access the http://server/connectcomputer web site on the server. After much head scratching, hair snatching, and Google searching, I decided to try uninstalling Norton Internet Security. We had disabled all the Symantec and Norton services but that didn't seem to help. Uninstallaing NIS did the trick. Apparently NIS hooks itself into the networking pretty tight. So, if you are trying to add workstations to a domain, SBS or otherwise, uninstall NIS first!
As you know, my daughter works for the Dallas gaming publisher Mumbo Jumbo. Recently they released a new version of their popular Luxor game which is now available on Windows Live Messenger. Recently D Magazine, a magazine about what's happening in Dallas (Big D), published an article about Mumbo Jumbo and Luxor. Please read it at http://www.dmagazine.com/article.asp?articleid=1178. There's a bunch of Mumbo Jumbo going on and it's exciting!
This holiday weekend I decided to finally try out the new Windows VISTA. I loaded it on an old server with an AMD 1.33 MHz processor, 1 GB RAM, and a couple of 40 GB drives. The initial installation went relatively well. However, it seemed to stumble on a couple of hardware items. The main one that surprised me was the network interface card. I had loaded an earlier Beta on this machine with no problem. But now it would not recognize my 3COM 3C905CX-TXM. I also tried an SMC card with the same results. I was able to download the drivers (not the VISTA drivers but the pre-VISTA ones) from the 3COM site and they worked fine. Same thing with the TekRam SCSI card. I was surprised the 3COM drivers weren't included in the OS. They are in XP as I recall.
After getting it all up and running, I installed Office 2007 and that went relatively well. Then, since I want to run the CRM Outlook client, I uninstalled Outlook 2007, because it won't work with the CRM Outlook client, and installed Outlook 2003. Then I went to install the CRM Outlook Desktop client. I knew there would be issues with the Laptop client as VISTA will only run SQL 2005 SP2 (maybe SP1 with CRM) but I wasn't ready to test that, yet. I figured the Desktop client would have a much better chance since it doesn't require a local SQL (MSDE or SQL 2005 Express). Unfortunately I was wrong. First I had trouble trying to install the .NET Framework 1.1 and SP1 and eventually had to go to Microsoft Downloads to download and install both the Framework 1.1 and SP1 for Framework 1.1. Still the Desktop CRM client would not clear the pre-installation checks. The main problem was the Operating System. VISTA is not recognized as an acceptable operating system for the CRM Outlook Client (and I presume the Laptop client). I'll have to either dig a little deeper, or wait until the CRM 3.0C Compatability release is released. Maybe I'll go ahead and run Outlook 2007 on this VISTA machine in the mean time. I kinda like the interface.
This past week I was invited to conduct CRM training for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the Chicago area (ChicagoLand as they say up there). The students were from a large non-profit organization. It was a good experience and the students seemed to learn a lot, as did I. There were a couple of questions that came up that I felt appropriate to query the other CRM MVPs about.
First: We were discussing how the Outlook client will synchronize contacts between CRM and Outlook. This organization has a lot of donors and there was a concern that potentially loading sever hundred thousand donors, large and small, as contacts in CRM could cause problems with filling up users' Exchange mailboxes. I posted this to the CRM MVP list and received some interesting answers. First, when you set up the Outlook client, you DON'T have to synchronize everything. Scott Colson, CRM MVP from the Seattle area suggested If you don't want CRM Contacts to synchronize to Outlook, you can UNCHECK the Contacts box in the CRM -> Options, Synchronization tab. But this would mean that no CRM Contacts would be synchronized to Outlook. Guy Riddle, CRM MVP in Australia, suggested assigning all Contacts to the CRM Admin user via a workflow rule so they would be owned by the Organization might be an approach. Eventually we (the client and I) decided that the best approach would be to import all those 'donor's as Leads so they wouldn't be in the Contacts data at all. As appropriate, those Leads could be moved into Contacts when warranted. That seemed to fit how they would be working with these donors. Another possibility would be to creae a Custom Entity called Donors.
The other question concerned having geographically dispersed offices and CRM users. Is it possible/practical to have mutliple SQL servers maintaining the CRM data at the various locations? The basic answer, provided by CRM MVP Matt Parks, was that a good, fast, stable, reliable 'pipe' between the outlying sites and the central CRM SQL server was the best bet. Of course one can have multiple CRM servers, but the data pretty much needs to be in one location. Other options were possible, but not necessarily practical.
One other thing I learned while preparing for the class (Installation and Configuration) was that in a CRM Small Business Edition installation, you may still have multiple CRM servers. Of course the first server, the SBE server, must be installed on the Small Business Server. But additional CRM servers may be installed on member servers in the Small Business Server network as well. I plan to try it out and see what happens. I'll let you know how it goes.
For some time I have had a CRM workflow rule associated with new Leads that sends them an e-mail saying I was glad to have met them. Naturally I include my signature block at the end, Name, E-mail, etc. I had this hard coded into the e-mail template. Recently my wife joined me to help with Business Development. She is now gathering Leads so we'd like the workflow rule to include her signature when she enteres her Leads and use my signature when I enter Leads.
I figured this would be no problem. I redesigned the e-mail template to include fields from the User record for the signature. When that e-mail template is used manually, like a Send Direct E-mail, it works great. However, when my wife enters new Leads, the system generates the glad to meet ya e-mail using MY signature. It shows the Sender as her, but it's my info in the signature. When I send it of course, it's correct. Bummer! I'm sure I'm not unique in wanting to be able to include fields from the User record in workflow generated templates.
One of the perks of being a CRM MVP is having a bit of a channel to the developement team. I posted my problem and received the answer that Workflow considers the owner of the Workflow Rule to be the owner when templates are evaluated, not the owner of the entity record. So, since I was the owner of the Rule, my information was always being used. The team explained that this is how it works and that it likely should be changed. However in the interim, they posted a workaround on their blog. It involves creating an assembly and linking that to workflow. Working through it was a very educational process as I've not had the opportunity to work with sub assemblies yet. You can find their blog, including the code to implement the solution, at http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2006/11/15/sending-email-via-workflow-as-different-user.aspx.
Thanks Shashi and the CRM Team!
This morning our CRM study group had a look at Entity Relationships. Since we’re all computer guys we decided to create a new entity called Network to play with. Networks are generally owned by companies so we created a relationship between Networks and Companies (or Accounts). Now a company can have more than one network but a network can only belong to one company. So we created a Many-to-One relationship between Network and Company. If we look at it from the Company perspective it would be the other way around, one company to many networks, or a One-to-Many relationship.
The next step is to decide the type of relationship. The basic choices are Parental and Referential. The basic concepts here are that with Parental, if you do something with the parent, like delete it, the same will happen to the child. Since a Network would belong to a Company and should we delete that company for some reason, there would be no need to keep the Network information, we set up a Parental relationship.
Once the relationships are established, we need to build the forms used to enter and display the information. We created the fields that relate to the network like IP address and Domain Name and entered those on the form. Creating the relationship also created a field for Company within the Network entity that is a Lookup type, meaning that we find the value by looking it up in the Company list.
The Company field on the Network form has a search glass to the right. Since networks also have workstations associated with them, we created another entity called, likely enough, Workstations. Workstations shows up in the Navigation Bar for Networks. Clicking on Workstations will give us a list of the workstations in the network.
We also added a section on ISP Information which includes a lookup for ISP. We created an entity called ISP and since many networks can use a given ISP, or stated another way, an ISP can be related to many networks, we set up a One-to-Many relationship between ISPs and Networks. A nice feature of this is that ISP will show up in our Workplace so if we want to see a list of all the networks that use a certain ISP, all we have to do is have a look at the networks associated with that ISP.
Once you think through how these relationships work, they’re not that mystifying. But they can certainly seem that way at first.
(I tried to post this with screen shots but apparently our blog site doesn’t support graphics.)
The other day my Action Pack finally arrived and in it was the much anticipated SBS 2003 R2 release. I was surprised to see that it came on a single DVD instead of a bunch of CDs. One DVD is a lot better than juggling a bunch of CDs, but will it work? Pre-R2 SBS 2003 also had a DVD but it was (supposedly - I never really used it) a bit funky. If you used it to install SBS, you had to navigate the directory to select the various installation CD images. Or something like that. Anyway, I was a bit skeptical when I saw the single DVD.
My goal is to migrate my own SBS 2003 SP1 server to SBS R2 before attempting to do so for clients. Or before even installing it on new installations. So naturally I'm loading it on a VPC first (it's actually in the process of installing as I write this).
So far I've been pleased. My VPC was able to boot off of the DVD and has been installing fine eversince without ever asking for a disc or a directory, etc. I do notice that it is going to install Exchange SP1, but as I said, I'm in the middle of the install as I write this. I'm sure it will eventually load SP2.
My ultimate goal is to see how R2 works with CRM and especially how CRM works with SQL 2005. Microsoft has recently released a version of CRM to work with SBS R2 so I need to see how that goes. They've also recently Beta'd SP2 for SQL 2005 Express which will be needed for the CRM Outlook Laptop client to run on Vista. Loading SBS R2 on my VPC will give me a test bed to see how all this works. Stay tuned!
Anne Stanton (www.crmlady.com) was in town for the ITA (Information Technology Alliance) conference this week. She had fun having dinner on the River Walk, eating BBQ at The County Line, and visiting a 'ranch' where more BBQ was available. I had told her to be sure to have her picture taken with Woodrow the Longhorn but she didn't :-) Oh yes, there were seminars as well where successful IT consultants did brain dumps on how they had made their practices successful.
Today we treated Anne to some good old Tex-Mex food at the Alamo Cafe. Anne confessed it had only taken her about 3 months to recover from her last trip to San Antonio!
Joining us were members of the Geeks, the affectionate name for our Saturday morning CRM study group, and Shane and Rho who now run the Austin SBS User Group. It was a great time with lots of Geek Speak. I'm afraid my poor wife who joined us as well had a bit of a time keeping up. But she enjoyed it as well.
Please come back whenever you can, Anne!
Well, I have been unable to blog here since I 'upgraded' to Internet Explorer 7 recently. The few blogs I have posted were done on another workstation that still runs IE 6. Tonight I have loaded a beta of Windows Live Writer which is supposed to let me blog without worrying about my IE version. This is my first attempt to do so after installing Windows Live Writer.
So, here goes!