Microsoft Launches CRM Online

With the price increase for my target market, the launch of CRM Online (formally called CRM Live) is a great solution. This will allow them to take advantage of the benefits of Microsoft CRM without having to purchase an additional server or enterprise license. Read more about it here...

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.

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)....

Microsoft CRM 3.0, SBS 2003 and Faxing

Ok, we have a customer that wanted to do a fax blast through Microsoft CRM to approx 10000 Leads.

The campaign setup typically creates these faxes as individual activities that need to be manually executed. Not a great option, as none of them (I quickly excluded myself as an option!!!) wanted to click through each one to get the fax sent.

Soooo, after some research I figured out a short term fix (below) and a long term fix (I'll post the CRM Workflow examples when I'm done).

Here's the 411...

Ok, I have a long term fix, and a short term fix for you.

1) I did an advanced search in CRM 3.0 to determine the 8K Leads we wanted, customized the view to have only the first,last and fax number.
2) I exported those names
3) I opened Outlook, clicked on Contacts, and created a second group called "Fax Leads"
4) I imported the contacts into that list, and made that a public folder.
5) I quit Outlook
6) I opened the 1 page word document we wanted to fax, and choose Print, and in the Wizard, had the option of picking a Address Book. Under Outlook, the public Fax Leads showed up with all the contacts. You'll have to shift click to select them all and then Click the "Fax To" to get them in the big list. Now I know that sounds intuitive, but any variation of that doesn't seem to work quite right (only a few get added, or 1 gets added---you'll see what I mean).
7) Fax Away!
8) Then, after a weekend of the fax machine running...I realized the customer BOUGHT the leads lists (I did the import, so I should have seen this coming), and the fax numbers didn't have a 1 in front of them. The SBS Fax software is VERY picky, and NONE of the Area Code Settings in the control panel worked.
This may not be an issue for you, but I had to follow this and redo steps 4 on.

The downside is that this doesn't get stored in the history.

Long Term

I'm working on a workflow that walks through the activities and does it in the background. We were in a hurry, and it was more important to get the faxes out...

Enabling Tracing in Microsoft CRM 3.0

OK, so you need to turn on CRM Outlook Synchronization Tracing because the darn outlook client is acting up. This requires registry key changes that ARE NOT DIRECTLY SUPPORTED BY MICROSOFT (These keys are not documented anywhere). Make these changes at your own risk. Make sure you back up the CRM client registry key before continuing. HKCU->Software->Microsoft->MSCRMCLIENT.

Copy the following into a text document:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient]

"TraceDirectory"="c:\\crmtrace"

"TraceEnabled"=dword:00000001

"TraceCategories"="*:Verbose"

"TraceCallStack"=dword:00000001

"TraceRefresh"=dword:00000001

"TraceSchedule"="Hourly"

Put whatever local drive location you wish in the TraceDirectory key. Makes sure this directory exists on the client machine.

Save the document with a “.reg” extension. The will make it a registry merge file. Copy this file to the client machine you want to trace. Double click on the file and choose to merge the registry values into the registry. CRM outlook client tracing is now setup on that client computer.



Restart outlook. The synchronization process should start again. Open windows explorer and navigate to the directory you specified in “TraceDirectory”. You should now see log files in this directory (if you don’t see them right away, wait a few seconds). Let these files grow for a little bit (a minute or so) then open the log file that was growing. You will see verbose tracing about the synchronization process. Look for repeating error sections. You will probably notice that the error is around a particular record in CRM. Look at the XML for that record. Look for thing like:



Malformed XML
Bad character data
Malformed email addresses
Malformed web addresses


If you see anything unusual, fix the record either using CRM (preferred) or directly in SQL (not supported by Microsoft). Re-run the synchronization process and re-examine the log files. Repeat until you get the process working correctly.