Workflow in CRM 4.0

I've been rebuilding (I wanted to start from Scratch) on some of the workflow processes that we use to run parts of our business. From a professional services standpoint, this process is a simplified workflow that outlines the four stages of our Managed Services sales process with only a couple of tasks at each stage (I can't give away all my secrets you know, hahahah).

The new workflow manager:

I'm very impressed with the built in functionality. The major feature I like is the ability to create and manage workflows from my Desktop instead of having to remote into the server like I did in version 3...

I'm working on a workflow design tutorial that will take some of the best processes I've seen and outline how to work with them in CRM 4.0. I know these won't be applicable to everyone, but with some tweaking they should be a great start. It just seems like workflow examples are almost non existant, so I'll post mine. If anyone has any ideas on examples that they'd like to see, I'd love to have them!

CRM 4.0 Installed on our SBS Server 2003 r2

Well, we official have CRM 4.0 running on our SBS 2003 r2 server. I had to investigate an issue with SQL Server 2005 during the installation process. There is a hotfix KB936305 that needed to be installed to get SQL Server fully patched. Once we did that the installation worked great...

The outstanding issue that I have relates to the version of Microsoft CRM 4.0 that is allowed to be installed ON the SBS Server. Apparently, after talking with Microsoft Support reps on the private forums, ONLY the Workgroup edition (which is limited to 5 users) is supported on SBS 2003 r2. In my case, the only 'choice' I had when I installed was based on the product key I typed in. I used the Professional 'trial' key, with no problems, but am curious as to how I 'tell' the installation to install the Workgroup (we will have more than 5 users, so we'll need professional----Just like most of my customers).

We already have 1 member server on the domain running our support server, but I'd hate to have to throw a 2nd member server in the mix for maybe 10-15 users of CRM. I'll keep investigating this.

Fixing the SBS Monitoring and VSS errors (and backup not working)

Earlier today I posted that while my SQL Server 2005 upgrade seemed to work fine, the remaining MSDE 2000 instances (monitoring) were throwing errors in the Application log. I figured out how to fix it....

First of all, Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 920899 can be found here, and it fixed my problems. The first go around I missed the following steps, and once I completed that and rebooted the server, the backups worked, the Monitoring worked, etc.


1. Click Start, click Run, type cliconfg, and then click OK.
2. In the Client Network Utility dialog box, click to turn on the Enable shared memory protocol check box, and then click OK.
3. Restart the computer.

Now, I'm getting errors SQLVDI like this "
SQLVDI: Loc=CVDS::Cleanup. Desc=Release(ClientAliveMutex). ErrorCode=(288)Attempt to release mutex not owned by caller.
. Process=4068. Thread=5400. Client. Instance=. VD=. "

but I saw when researching the other issues that this wasn't a huge deal...It's covered via hotfix in KB934396 which can be found here.

The aftermath of upgrading to SBS 2003 r2

Ok, everything on the Sharepoint side of moving to SQL Server 2005 went very well, BUT now the SBSmonitoring service won't start, and I'm getting errors relating to Volume shadow copy services. In addition, the WSUS services are having problems connecting to the database. I've posted the event information to the microsoft sbs newsgroup, and hope to hear from them soon. It certainly isn't a huge issue, and the Sharepoint seems to work great on 2005.



I've configured the reporting services, and ended up having to go into IIS and reassign the .Net version to the old 1.x and then back to 2.0. Once I did that, I could browse to servername\Reports and get to the Report Manager. I created a new folder in the Report Manager, so that also indicated it was working. I also verified that Reporting Services were working by browsing to servername\ReportServer and saw the test folder with the SQL Version number:



Now that I have verified that all works, I'm off to work on installing CRM 4.0

Microsoft CRM 4.0 SDK now available

The new SDK for Microsoft CRM 4.0 was released recently and you can find it here. If you do any development work with CRM, the SDK's have been a necessary resource. I'm still in the process of upgraing my SBS 2003 server to CRM 4.0, but just yesterday managed to upgrade it from SBS 2003 sp1 to SBS 2003 r2. It was quite the process upgrading the database from 2000 to 2005, but everything went through without a hitch. The microsoft instructions (found here) were just as good as the ones from smallbizserver.net (you have to have a subscription to use these, but they have screen shots)....

What to do when your customers emails are blocked

http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2008/01/03/what-to-check-when-exchange-cannot-send-email-to-certain-domains.aspx

This is a neat post that describes why your customers might call you and say 'so and so didn't get my email and I sent 50 test ones!'....

The majority of the time, we find that the email issues appear on the remote/recipients server. In the case of our customers we almost always use a smarthost for outbound mail (we like dyndns.com). By setting up an account with DynDns, we get an additional bonus: A backup mail server that will hold our customers incoming mail in case the server isn't available.