MS Dynamics CRM

I work for Microsoft now

David Vidmar — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:00:27 GMT

It’s been quiet around here and for a good reason. As I hinted before there has been many changes in my life recently. In same week I became father for second time (father of three boys now, twins and a new baby!), finally finished my engineer’s degree and finally, I joined the ranks of best company in the world to work for – Microsoft.

I’ll be working as I consultant for Biztalk Server and Forefront Identity Manager and from time to time a Dynamics CRM consultant.

So, what can you expect? Occasional dry stints, lots of BTS and FIM links, Windows Phone 7, Azure and Windows 8 and other cool Microsoft stuff.

If you are fellow Microsoftie, please look me up and drop me a note – let’s connect!

Dynamics CRM 4.0 build number tables updated with RU 17 & 18 [CRM]

David Vidmar — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 20:53:53 GMT

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM is asleep when it comes to Dynamics CRM 4.0. While the majority of work is being done on 2011 version rollup updates 17 & 18 have been released. Thumbs up!

I have updated the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 build numbers table accordingly.

Better demo data for Dynamics CRM 2011 [CRM]

David Vidmar — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:02:18 GMT

Few days ago Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Management team released a set of demo data for Dynamics CRM 2011 Online.

This it contains more sample data than default on-premise data so I wondered if it can be imported to on-premise version. the answer - with just a bit of tweaking it can!

Here are the steps:

Download sample data and demo scripts
Unzip Admin-1.zip and open Users.xml in Excel
Create all users from Users.xml in your domain
Change the domain in “User Name” column in Users.xml file to match your domain name
Create new organization
Create USD currency if this isn’t your default currency
Import Admin-1.zip and ignore error about Users.xml
Import fixed Users.xml file
Follow instructions on blog post for the rest of the files…

Don’t forget to go through the demo scripts and explore the data.

Scribe MVP

David Vidmar — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:19:29 GMT

I have worked with Scribe Insight integration tool a lot lately and I’m proud to announce that great team at Scribesoft recognized me as one of the experts and so I joined their Scribe MVP team.

Thank you Scribesoft and I look forward to more great Scribe integrations!

Great CRM tool - MSCRM4 ToolBox [CRM]

David Vidmar — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:16:19 GMT

One of the oldest email I had sitting in my inbox was a nice letter from guy named Treasure Baloyi, asking me to review his Microsoft Dynamics CRM tool. I have waited way too long…

MSCRM4 Toolbox is a comprehensive and extensive tool for managing your CRM instance.

The tool includes:

Security Role Manager that lets you assign/remove to more than one user at once.
Roles Export / Import utility that lets you export and import roles.
ERC Generator that will generate relationship diagram from the entities.
Bulk Data Deleter utility that will help you delete records at large.
Attribute Usage Analyzer which is very useful if you are not sure if you can remove the attribute. Just find where it is used (forms, workflows, js, cs,..)
Attribute Updater that will let you mass update attributes.

It’s extendable, so you decide which tools you want to include in your toolbox. The feature I also like very much is, that the tool is available as portable package – so no server installs!

I have yet to use it in real life, but this seems like a real time saver tool!

Let’s just hope he develops Dynamics CRM 2011 compatible version, but some of this tools work with 2011 already!

PS: I have also included MSCRM4 ToolBox in my Ultimate Dynamics CRM Tools List.

Update Rollup 1 is available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 [CRM]

David Vidmar — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:56:51 GMT

Quickly after RTM Microsoft released Update Rollup 1 for Dynamics CRM 2011. The list of fixes is really long!

We did have quite a few issues with new installations and 4.0 upgrades so I really hope this update fixes at least some of them.

Update can be downloaded manually or through Windows Update, but only after April 26th.

I also started MS CRM 2001 build numbers table, similarly to what I did for MS CRM 4 build numbers.

But you saw that already if you subscribe to my feed. If you don’t you really should!

On the side note, I also updated the 4.0 table with Update Rollup 16.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 build numbers [CRM]

David Vidmar — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:32:18 GMT

When managing Dynamics CRM 2011 deployments it useful to know which rollup version is installed.

Following table lists build numbers by version.

Version	Build Number	Release Date	Windows Update Date
RC	5.0.9688.53		-	-
RTM	5.0.9688.583	February 16, 2011	-	Download
Update Rollup 1	5.0.9688.1045	April 7, 2011	April 26, 2011	Download
Update Rollup 2	5.0.9688.1155 5.0.9688.1157	June 2, 2011	June 28, 2011	Download
Update Rollup 3	5.0.9688.1244	July 28, 2011	August 23, 2011	Download
Update Rollup 4	5.0.9688.1450	September 22, 2011	Not available!	Download
Update Rollup 5	5.0.9688.1533	October 25, 2011	November 8, 2011	Download
Update Rollup 6	5.0.9689.1985	January 12, 2012	January 24, 2012	Download	No uninstall! Slipstreamed Client and Server available!
Update Rollup 7	5.0.9690.2165	March 22, 2012	April 10, 2012	Download
Update Rollup 8	5.0.9690.2243	May 3, 2012	May 22, 2012	Download

I’ll update this as new rollups come out. If you find a bug, let me know!

Error when connection to Dynamics CRM [Scribe]

David Vidmar — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:52:39 GMT

When trying to connect to Dynamics CRM server from Scribe you often get an error.

First thing to check is the real error. You do that by expanding error box by clicking “Details” (1).

Next, list through errors with “Next” (2), first one will always (?) be useless and just showing “ADP”.

The real error is then shown.

If you run Scribe on Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 or later with UAC enabled, you will get “Requested access is not allowed”. If you read complete error, you will notice it is not CRM related at all. Scribe is trying to write current connection info to registry in order to help you next time you will try to connect to CRM.

Resolution is very simple, but I still fall for this, so that is why I'm writing it down:

Run Scribe Workbench and Scribe Console with elevated privileges – right click and select “Run as Administrator”!

Clean up Active Directory groups used by Dynamics CRM Server [CRM]

David Vidmar — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 22:04:44 GMT

If you install CRM server more than once on same machine, you will end up with more AD security groups than necessary. They will not do any harm, but every decent admin tries to keep his AD tidy.

From AD management tools it’s not very obvious which groups are latest and in use, but simple SQL query will solve the mystery. Just run the following query in any active organizations database. It will give you the names of two groups, but you can deduce others you will need.

SELECT SqlAccessGroupName, ReportingGroupName FROM Organization

Just to be on the safe side… Don’t delete groups just yet. Move them in some other OU, test the server and delete them after you confirm everything is still working.

Scribe 7.0.2 [Scribe]

David Vidmar — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 08:38:00 GMT

Scribesoft just release an update version of it’s Scribe product with version number 7.0.2. This update fixes several bugs and I’m glad to point out that is also fixes an issue we bumped into, when OLE DB adapter was having problems with SQL tables and views that had spaces in the name (Dynamics NAV tables).

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