7.22.2005

Microsoft CRM 1.2 Redeployment

Well, I successfully completed my first CRM 1.2 redeployment this week from one server running SBS 2003 to a new server running SBS 2003. Here's the re-cap:

Scenario: Existing SBS server was underpowered and was being replaced with a new server with 3.6 GHz Dual Xeon processors and 3GB or RAM. Sweet. CRM was heavily customized, had several 3rd-party add-ons and numerous custom reports. ISV menus abounded, and there were some minor custom apps integrated as well.

Tools: MS CRM Redeployment Tools downloaded from Microsoft's website.

Review: As I often find, Microsoft's documentation was less than comprehensive. Thankfully, I've had enough experience with CRM to have been able to fill in most of the gaps, and looking at some past entries on the public CRM newsgroup was helpful as well. I don't suppose this is a project that someone would tackle if they didn't have a thorough understanding of CRM, but it always amazes me how much Microsoft's documentation takes for granted. I am a firm believer that technical documents should be written as though the audience is a complete neophyte. This is not to talk down to the reader, but because you can't assume your audience has intricate knowledge of the many related technical fields, especially with a product like CRM. To read MS' redeployment documentation, you really need to have an understanding of CRM, SQL, IIS, Crystal, your chosen backup tools, and other more cursory items.

Here's what I found lacking in their documentation:
1. Before beginning your redeployment, you should export your customizations and workflow to XML, and make copies of the web.config file and the isv.config file. If you have also customized the Sales For Outlook interface, you'll want to copy that config file as well. To get the customization XML, you go to Deployment Manager and right click on the top node and select Export Customizations. To get the workflow XML, you need to go to Start > Programs > Microsoft CRM > Export Workflow.

2. Installing the redeployment tools is pretty straightforward, and the documentation is adequate here. When you are backing up the CRM database files, though, you will have to stop SQL server. (Right click the little SQL icon in the system tray and choose stop.) This is not mentioned in the documentation, and if I was more of a SQL person, I probably would have known that immediately. As it was, it only took me a minute to figure this out. Fortunately.

3. The next bump I ran into was at the stage where I was trying to backup the Crystal reports. You need to run a command line utility to do this, and I followed the documentation to the letter, but couldn't get it to work. Several pages later, when the document covers publishing the reports onto the new server, there is a note that the procedure will not work if the Crystal password is not blank. I went back and changed the Crystal password to a blank one (In the CRM folder, go to the Tools folder. There's a CrystalAdmin.exe file that lets you do this) -- and voia -- the backup utility for the reports worked. Would have been nice if they had mentioned this earlier and saved me 90 minutes of trying different variations of the command.

4. Another SQL thing arises when you are restoring your databases. You restore the organization_MSCRM.mdf and the organization_Metabase.mdf files to the Data folder under MSSQL. But then, in SQL Enterprise Manager, you need to attach the databases in order to complete the restore. Right click on Databases > All Tasks > Attach. You'll want to name the databases exactly as they were on your previous server. This is not a difficult thing to do, but it certainly would have been nice if the documentation noted it. I guess I am just a stickler for detail and want to be able to read step-by-step every click and right-click I am going to be making.

After your redeployment, there are several things you'll need to do to get CRM running:

5. First, and perhaps most tedious, you need to update CRM server with the same exact hotfixes and patches that you had on your previous install. Hopefully you've got excellent documentation, or you may have to search the registry on the old server to find out which KB articles contained the hotfixes.

6. Turn off the GUID. If you had the annoying Email GUID turned off before, you'll need to turn it off again. This requires a simple DWORD value of 0 for the NameValue 'MessageTagBehavior' in the HKEYLOCALMACHINE/Software/Microsoft/MSCRM registry entry. You'll probably have to create a new one.

7. Import your workflow XML and customization XML. For workflows, all of the object ID's will have been changed for email templates, named users (as opposed to logical users), and subprocesses (other rules called by a workflow rule). You will need to go through each workflow rule one line at a time and re-associate these items. Make sure you get the Email templates, because they look like they are still calling the right template because the name is there in the rule, but you'll find that it is not populated in the template selection screen.

8. If you have any custom links to reports, or custom apps that call reports, you'll need to find out the new crystal report number for each report and make appropriate changes to the isv.config file or your custom app since these numbers are all changed when you publish the reports to the new server as well. To find the number of a report, run it from CRM and press Ctrl + N to open it in a new browser window. You'll see the number in the URL. (When you re-publish the reports, they should all show up and run fine from the Reports module area of the web UI, but, as in this case, you might have a custom menu on an object that calls a report and passes a parameters to it, in which case you'll need to make these changes.)

9. I also found that individual's email templates were not visible to them. Many people had created a signature template and the template was saved as being visible to an individual as opposed to the organization. To solver this, I opened each template and clicked on Tools > Make Visible To Organization. Then instruct users to copy their signatures and re-create them, so you can then delete the imported templates to unclutter the views of templates for everyone.

I think those are most of the holes I found in the documentation. The whole process took me less than a day. The next morning I went in and re-installed all the 3rd party apps, which took a good chunk of time. I hope this proves helpful to you if you are doing a redeployment of Microsoft CRM. It will be interesting to see how this relates to the upgrade process when MS CRM 3.0 ships.

7.20.2005

Customizing Activity Views

This question comes up so frequently, I don't know why I haven't posted it here on my blog already. The out-of-the-box views of activities are not very helpful at all. The first thing anyone using CRM 1.0 or 1.2 wants to do is put more useful columns in the activity views. I'm not sure if this was an accidental oversight of Microsoft or not, but the view customization forms are available, they just aren't linked to from anywhere in the web UI's customization pages.

There is an undocumented way to customize activity views in MSCRM (there are many posts on the Microsoft CRM newsgroup about this). Go to the following URL where 'crm' equals the name of your crm server:

http://crm/tools/viewEditor/viewManager.aspx?id=00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001899

you can also try these GUIDs to customize other views:

00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001899 My Activities
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001900 Open Activities
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001901 Closed Activities
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001902 All Activities
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001903 Activities Associated View
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001911 Homepage
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001951 Sales Process Activities Subgrid
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000000666100 Activities Advanced Find View
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010002000 Associated View: Notes
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001203 Associated View Opportunities
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001204 Articles
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001205 Associated View: Teams
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001206 Associated View: Competitors
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001207 Associated View: Business Units
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001208 Associated View: Roles
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001209 Articles - Manage KB Search
00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001210 Associated View: Contacts

7.06.2005

Two Recorded Webcasts About CRM 3 Features

These are very in-depth and information-packed webcasts from TechEd 2005 in June.

Overview of Changes

SDK and Integration

7.05.2005

Microsoft Previews Next Release of Customer Relationship Management Solution at Worldwide Partner Conference

Microsoft CRM 3.0 to provide a complete CRM suite with the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, and MINNEAPOLIS — July 5, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will preview the upcoming release of its customer relationship management solution, Microsoft® CRM 3.0, in timing with the Microsoft Tech•Ed 2005 Europe conference and the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2005 in the United States.

Microsoft CRM 3.0 will provide a complete suite of powerful marketing, sales and service capabilities, all with a familiar and consistent user experience based on Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook®. Extensive new configuration, customization and integration capabilities will make it easier for customers and partners to deploy highly tailored solutions that help drive measurable business results and offer a low total cost of ownership (TCO).

Microsoft CRM 3.0 is designed to address the three key challenges that determine the success or failure of most CRM initiatives: user adoption, business fit and total cost of ownership. The release is focused on three main themes:

Works the way you do. Microsoft CRM 3.0 offers a user experience familiar and comfortable to anyone who uses Microsoft Office or Microsoft Outlook. The Outlook client and Web client interfaces are completely redesigned to provide a look and feel consistent with other Microsoft products, allowing work to be completed more easily. Customers get instant visibility into trends and issues through prebuilt reports and views and can also take live CRM data directly into Microsoft Excel® for online or offline analysis. Microsoft CRM 3.0 provides a complete mobility solution, with a new high-performance engine for role-based synchronization of laptop data as well as an improved client for Microsoft Windows Mobile™.

Works the way your business does. Microsoft CRM 3.0 completes the CRM suite by offering a rich marketing automation module for list management, campaign management, marketing resource management and closed-loop response management. The new release also will introduce a sophisticated new service scheduling module, which automatically manages complex scheduling requests that today require specific people, skills and resources. These new modules, along with enhancements to the sales and customer service capabilities previously available in Microsoft CRM 1.2, are highly configurable and workflow-driven, enabling consistent execution of CRM business processes, automated handling of exceptions and alerts, and closed-loop reporting and analysis across the organization.

Works the way IT wants it to. The new release extends the configurability, customizability and integration options for Microsoft CRM’s service-oriented architecture. New data objects can be easily added to the system and linked to other predefined objects, with all underlying data storage and Web services automatically generated by the system. A new environmental diagnostics wizard automatically checks more than 100 system and network settings to help ensure a fast and reliable installation, and a new upgrade advisor streamlines the upgrade process for existing Microsoft CRM 1.0 and 1.2 customers. Integration with Microsoft Operations Manager simplifies the management of the overall system.

“Every business — whether large or small — needs a fast, flexible and affordable way to manage and grow their relationships with current and prospective customers,” said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft CRM. “Microsoft CRM 3.0 provides exactly what our customers and partners need: a simple user experience based on Office and Outlook, a flexible CRM platform that easily adapts to fit each business, and fast implementations that can result in a low TCO. The feedback on this release from customers, partners and industry analysts has been tremendous, and with Microsoft CRM 3.0 we can help even more companies around the world reach their business goals.”

New Subscription-Based Licensing for Hosted Deployments
With the release of Microsoft CRM 3.0, Microsoft will introduce new subscription-based licensing for customers that prefer a hosted offering, furthering the company’s commitment to providing flexible and affordable CRM in both on-site and hosted deployment models. Because the same code is used in both models, customers can change their preferred deployment model from hosted to on-site (or vice versa) as their business and IT needs change.

New CRM Offering for Small Businesses
With the release of Microsoft CRM 3.0, Microsoft will introduce a Small Business Edition (SBE) designed for small businesses that use Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition (SBS 2003). The new version will deliver a simplified installation and an easy migration path from Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager, with the familiarity of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook. Pricing will be announced closer to availability.

New Features and Opportunities for Partners
Microsoft CRM is offered today through a network of more than 1,700 worldwide independent software vendors, value-added retailers and hosting providers; these partners deliver tailored solutions to small businesses, midsize companies and divisions of large enterprises. For Microsoft’s partners, Microsoft CRM 3.0 reduces the time and complexity in creating prepackaged vertical applications, in building integrations to other applications and data sources, and in helping to ensure fast implementations with a low TCO. The software development kit for Microsoft CRM 3.0 will be available to Microsoft partners later this year via the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN®). “After previewing Microsoft CRM 3.0, it’s clear to me that Microsoft has invested a massive amount of time and energy to develop a simple upgrade path for customers that currently use previous versions of the product,” said Kirk Herrington, executive vice president of Technology and Business Strategy for GaleForce Solutions Inc. “For most organizations, upgrading to Microsoft CRM 3.0 will be simple, which is great news for Microsoft partners and their customers.” “Microsoft CRM delivers a powerful and affordable way to automate customer business processes,” said Bernard McMahon, chairman of Just Good Business. “Using Microsoft Office and Outlook is second nature to employees throughout the world, making Microsoft CRM the natural choice.”

Extended Support for Worldwide Languages
Microsoft CRM 1.2 is available today in 53 countries and 16 languages, and the new release of Microsoft CRM will extend its reach to include 23 languages: Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and Iberian), Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Most languages will be available within 90 days of the initial release of Microsoft CRM 3.0.

Product Availability
Microsoft CRM was introduced in early 2002 and today helps more than 4,000 worldwide businesses deliver measurable improvements in their customer-facing business processes. Microsoft CRM 3.0 will be available to customers who are licensed to use previous versions of Microsoft CRM in the fourth quarter of 2005 and generally available in the first quarter of 2006. Customers who have purchased any modules of the Professional edition of previous versions of Microsoft CRM and that have an active Software Assurance agreement will receive rights to all available modules of the next release; specific license upgrade paths for other Microsoft CRM products will be announced later in the year.

 
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