The Irony of Microsoft

To top off the news of the MS CRM 2005 slippage I received an update from Partnersource about an hour after the news that the latest version was to be moved to the 4th quarter of 2005. The opening line of the update was...

2005 is off to a fast start for the Microsoft® Business Solutions CRM team

Microsoft again delays CRM update

Although the latest version of CRM was tagged to be released in the first half of this year, Microsoft have recently announced that the product will be delayed until the last quarter of this year.

Microsoft's famously slippery ship dates are sliding once again when it comes to the
company's long-delayed Microsoft CRM 2.0 update. Microsoft said Thursday it is
expanding the software's feature set and delaying its release-to-manufacturing
until the fourth quarter of 2005.

Read the full article here. (or Angus' spin on things here)

As quite a few CRM 1.2 Customers are eagerly awaiting the new release it will be interesting to see the reaction to the delay.

Ports and MS CRM

If using MS CRM through a firewall there are a certain number of ports that are required. If all required ports are opened you may experience problems such as "Unable to find server" when trying to run reports.

This is a list of all the ports that are used to access the Crystal APS uses.

TCP Ports
1080 CrystalAPS
1084 CrystalAPS
1092 CrystalAPS
1118 CrystalAPS
1137 CrystalAPS
6400 CrystalAPS

Unable to reinstall the CRM Exchange Router

"Insufficent Rights on the WWWRoot Director"
I came across this issue whilst trying to reinstall the CRM exchange router.
1. The uninstall seemed to go fine no error's were reported.
2. No user (including domain admins) had access to modfy the WWWRoot Directory
3. When attempting to view the properties of the Directory the only tab that was available was the Sharing Tab.

As a result no permissions on the directory could be changed and therfore it wasn't possible to reinstall the router.

Turns out that during the uninstall of the CRM Exchange Router it had deleted the wwwroot directory under IIS. However as the IIS services were still running some residual aspects of the folder remained. When IIS was stopped the directory disappeared.

The only way to fix the problem is to recreate the wwwroot directory (or reinstall IIS) then reinstall the exchange router

CRM Exchange Router and Multiple CRM environments

This is a problem I came across the other day which is a bit of a trap concidering the options in the CRM Exchange Router Installation.
The customer has 3 CRM environments Development, Test and Production. For these 3 enviroments there is only one Exchange Server. When the exchange router is linked to 1 CRM server the system functions as expected however when more than one of the CRM servers is linked the system does not automatically promote any emails and does not present any errors in the event log. All 3 CRM Environments are installed with the same Administrator account.

Issues with installing multiple CRM environments in the same domain is related to Exchange and the CRM E-mail Router. With V1.2 of Microsoft CRM we are only able to point the CRM E-mail Router at one CRM installation. It can handle multiple CRM servers, but only for the same organization. Below is the Knowlegebase article that discusses this:
"How does the Microsoft CRM Exchange E-mail Router work with multiple Microsoft CRM Server installations on one domain (861418)"
Direct Link: https://mbs.microsoft.com/knowledgebase/KBDisplay.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;861418

For testing purposes, you may want to separate production environments and test environments as much as possible to limit any effects from having a test environment being changed or go up/down during the business day.
It is possible to have two CRM implementations in the same domain for production and testing purposes but can cause issues and limitations in testing. Here are some limitations
- EULA states can only use production license for 30 days. So you would want to use Adventure Works License
- Separation between production and Dev to limit any effects caused by testing
- SQL needs own server for replication
- Exchange router only work with 1 implementation per domain