Wednesday, February 08, 2012

CRM 2011 rollup update 6

Update Rollup 6 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is available

Update Rollup 6 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is available. This article describes the hotfixes and the updates that are included in this update rollup. This update rollup is available for all languages that are supported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.
Here is roll up update 6 available for crm 2011

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2600640

Regards,

Imran

[MVP CRM] = https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/imran.mustafa

MSN/IM= mscrmexpert@gmail.com
SKYPE= mscrmexpert
BLOG= http://microsoftcrm3.blogspot.com
Linkedin = http://www.linkedin.com/in/mscrmexpert
Twitter = @mscrmexpert

Sunday, February 05, 2012

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, codenamed “R8″

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, codenamed “R8″

Today Microsoft announced what’s going to be in their next service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, codenamed “R8″, under the headline: CRM Anywhere.

The R8 service update is expected to be available Q2 2011 and is built on six broad themes: Mobility, Browser Flexibility, Social, Industry Templates, SQL Server 2012, Certifications.

Mobility
Microsoft will be launching a new product, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile, which will enable CRM Online, partner-hosted and on-premise customers with Internet-facing deployments to use CRM on up to three devices per user.

There will be native clients, which means offline support, on all the main mobile platforms: Windows Phone 7.5, iPhone & iPad, Android, BlackBerry. I haven’t seen any of the licensing details yet, but I understand that this is a subscription service (even for on-premise customers) for $30 per user per month.

Browser Flexibility
For years prospective customers have been crying out for multi-browser support and Microsoft has finally delivered! Once R8 hits your CRM server you’ll be able to access CRM using: Internet Explorer 7 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP; Safari 5.1.1 or above on Mac OS-X or iOS5 ;Firefox 6 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP or Mac OS-X or iOS5; Chrome 13 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

Activity Feed Enhancements
In the Nov 2011 service update (codenamed “R7″) Microsoft released the new Activity Feeds feature which introduced some social enterprise features into CRM 2011. R8 introduces a series of enhancements to the Activity Feeds feature: like/dislike, enhanced filtering (e.g. @me, types of records I follow, record views), and an updated mobile activity feeds client for Windows Phone 7.5.

Industry Templates
Building on the work of Microsoft partners and its own consulting team, the Dynamics Labs will be releasing several industry templates into the Dynamics Marketplace. The first few templates will be: Wealth Management, Non-Profit, Health Sales Plans
Relationship Management for Health.

The templates will include data model customizations, dashboards, workflows and sample data. They’re designed to help customers in those industries visualise how Dynamics CRM can help their business, and speed up an implementation without necessarily being a fully-packaged vertical industry product.

SQL Server 2012
Microsoft’s own data centers have already been upgraded to SQL Server 2012 and the R8 service update bring official support for partners and customers wanting to upgrade their own deployments to SQL Server 2012. Additionally, there will be some new CRM features that make use of SQL Server 2012 new capabilities. For example: performance improvements, enhanced database recovery, next generation business intelligence (“Crescent”) such as pre-defined Power Pivot models, Power View reports, and time-animated reports.

Certifications
Certifications are critical to enterprise adoption and Microsoft has been working hard over the last year to ensure that its data centers and CRM Online service meets several important certification standards including: ISO27001, SAS 70 Type II, SOX, SSAE 16 SOC1, Safe Harbor, Data Processing Agreement, EU Model Clauses and HIPAA compliance (supported through Business Partner Agreements).

For More Information
Download the R8 Release Preview Guide from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM website:http://crmpublish.blob.core.windows.net/docs/ReleasePreviewGuide.pdf

Read the CRM Anywhere blog article by new CRM General Manager Dennis Michalis:https://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmnontechnical/b/crmconnection/archive/2012/02/06/crm-anywhere.aspx

Regards,

Imran

Friday, February 03, 2012

Dynamics CRM 2011: Rename an Organization

Dynamics CRM 2011 : Rename an Organization

Step by Step Guide.

Here are Step by Step guide to renaming an Organization in CRM 2011.

Open the CRM 2011 Deployment Manager then select the Organizations node. The list of organizations should look something like this:

1. Highlight the selected Organization the click the Disable link.

You will be prompted to confirm that you wish to disable the organization:

2. Select Yes.

Note: Remember that a Disabled organization can’t be accessed.

3. Click the Edit Organization link:

and the Edit Organization Wizard will be displayed:

You will notice that you can’t edit the Name field. That’s the physical name of the CRM Organizational database and that can’t be changed once it’s created.

You can however, change the following:

Display Name
SQL Server
SQL Server Reporting Services URL

In this exercise, we’ll just be changing the Display Name.

4. Change the Display name field to the new name.

5. Click Next and the standard installation environmental checks:

Assuming you don’t encounter any errors, then click the Next button and you will be asked to perform one last verification before proceeding:

6. Click the Apply button. The changes will be applied and again, assuming you don’t encounter any issues, you’ll see the following dialog:

7. Click the Finish button.

Back in the organization list, you will see the change you just made:

8. The last step is to highlight the organization and click the Enable link to enable the newly changed CRM organization.

Conclusion

As you can see from the following figure, you’ll notice that the URL for the organization remains the same, but the Display Name has been changed:

Let me know if you have any issue in this.

Regards,

Imran

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Network Load Balancing (NLB) Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on a Network Load Balanced (NLB) server cluster is a supported way to get increased scalability and high availability performance from your CRM deployment.

Why load balancing?

Using NLB, you can cluster multiple Windows 2008 servers together. It provides added scalability as you can easily add additional nodes to the cluster as your usage grows, and it provides high availability, because if one node fails, traffic will be routed to other servers in the cluster.

To learn more about configuring a NLB cluster in Windows 2008, see the NLB deployment guide at Technet. Network load balancing is available in Windows 2008 R2, including Standard or Enterprise versions.

Installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on a NLB cluster

Once your NLB cluster is configured, installation of Microsoft CRM is very similar to a non-clustered deployment. The following is the process to deploy CRM on a two-node NLB cluster:

1. Install CRM 2011 on the first node. Choose create a new deployment.

2. Install CRM 2011 on the second node, pointing to the existing deployment created in step 1.

3. When done, CRM should be available from both nodes, as well as from the cluster url.

4. On one of the servers open the Deployment manager. On the right side actions pane, click properties, then go to the web address tab. The URL’s in this tab will reflect the URL of the first node on which you installed CRM. Update the URL’s to reflect the cluster URL. This will insure that any references in the application, as well as plugins, point to the cluster URL, otherwise you may see cross-site script errors.

Now your NLB CRM cluster is complete, and users can access CRM, both in browser as well as Outlook, using the URL of the cluster.

It’s important to underscore, anything that you store on the server will need to be located on all nodes of the cluster—if you have any custom web pages that you embed in iframes, you will need to have them on both servers, and you will want to have consistent versions of these files on all servers.

Installing Update Rollups

If you network load balance, you will want to be sure that you install the update rollups on each server in your NLB cluster

Let me know if you need help in this type of configuration.

Regards,

Imran

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

“What are the requirements to run Dynamics CRM 2011?”

“What are the requirements to run Dynamics CRM 2011?”

Here’s the location of the actual Implementation Guide. Download the Microsoft_Dynamics_CRM_2011_IG.zip
file and extract it.What follows are the sections from the “Planning Guide” doc file (from around page 25). And remember: these are just the base hw/sw requirements – that is, what you need to have in place before you start installing. Obviously, the 64-bit Windows 2008/SQL 2008 requirement is a big jump for many organizations.

So…here are the hardware and software requirements to run the on-premise version of Dynamics CRM Server 2011:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011 hardware requirements

The following table lists the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011 running in a Full Server configuration. These requirements assume that additional components such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft SharePoint, or Microsoft Exchange Server are not installed or running on the system.

Component	*Minimum	*Recommended
Processor	x64 architecture or compatible dual-core 1.5 GHz processor	Quad-core x64 architecture 2 GHz CPU or higher such as AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon systems
Memory	2-GB RAM	8-GB RAM or more
Hard disk	10 GB of available hard disk spaceNote Computers with more than 16GB of RAM will require more disk space for paging, hibernation, and dump files.	40 GB or more of available hard disk spaceNote Computers with more than 16GB of RAM will require more disk space for paging, hibernation, and dump files.

* Actual requirements and product functionality may vary based on your system configuration and operating system.

The minimum and recommended requirements are based on 320-user load simulation tests.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011 software requirements

Windows Server operating system

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server can be installed only on Windows Server 2008 x64-based computers. The specific versions and editions of Windows Server that are supported for installing and running Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011 are listed in the following section.

Important

The Windows Server 2003 family of operating systems are not supported for installing and running Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server.

Server virtualization

Microsoft Dynamics CRM servers can be deployed in a virtualized environment by using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V or virtualization solutions from vendors who participate in the Microsoft Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). You must understand the limitations and best practices of server virtualization before you try to virtualize your installation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For information about Hyper-V, see the Microsoft Virtualization (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=145119) Web site.

Internet Information Services (IIS)

We recommend that you install and run IIS 7.0 or a later version in Native Mode before you install Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011. However, if IIS is not installed and it is required for a Microsoft Dynamics CRM server role, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server Setup will install it.

Microsoft SQL Server hardware requirements

The following table lists the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for Microsoft SQL Server. These requirements assume that additional components such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft SharePoint, or Microsoft Exchange Server are not installed or running on the system.

Component	*Minimum	*Recommended
Processor	x64 architecture or compatible dual-core 1.5 GHz processor	Quad-core x64 architecture 2 GHz CPU or higher such as AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon systems
Memory	4-GB RAM	16-GB RAM or more
Hard disk	SAS RAID 5 or RAID 10 hard disk array	SAS RAID 5 or RAID 10 hard disk array

* Actual requirements and product functionality may vary based on your system configuration and operating system.

The minimum and recommended requirements are based on 320-user load simulation tests.

SQL Server software requirements

Any one of the following Microsoft SQL Server editions is required and must be installed on a Windows Server 2008 64-bit or later version, running, and available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Standard Edition, x64 SP1 or later version
Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Enterprise Edition, x64 SP1 or later version
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Datacenter x64 SP1 or later version
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Developer x64 SP1 or later version (for non-production environments only)

Important
- 32-bit versions of SQL Server 2008 database engine or Reporting Services are not supported for this version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Workgroup, Web, Compact, or Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express Edition editions are not supported for running Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011.
- Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 editions and are not supported for this version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
- Running 64-bit SQL Server 2008 versions for Itanium (IA-64) systems in conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics CRM will receive commercially reasonable support. Commercially reasonable support is defined as all reasonable support efforts by Microsoft Customer Service and Support that do not require Microsoft Dynamics CRM code fixes. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011 supports a named instance of SQL Server for configuration and organization databases.

SQL Server Reporting Services

Specific SQL Server Reporting Services editions are used for reporting functionality.

Any one of the following Microsoft SQL Server editions is required and must be installed on a Windows Server 2008 64-bit or later version, running, and available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Standard Edition, x64 SP1 or later version
Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Enterprise Edition, x64 SP1 or later version
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Datacenter x64 SP1 or later version
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Developer x64 SP1 or later version (for non-production environments only)

Important
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Workgroup, Web, Compact, or Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express Edition editions are not supported for running Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011.
- Running 64-bit SQL Server 2008 versions for Itanium (IA-64) systems in conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics CRM will receive commercially reasonable support. Commercially reasonable support is defined as all reasonable support efforts by Microsoft Customer Service and Support that do not require Microsoft Dynamics CRM code fixes.
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Workgroup is not supported for running the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Reporting Extensions. This is because SQL Server 2008 Workgroup does not support custom data extensions. Therefore, features such as creating, running, or scheduling Fetch-based or SQL-based reports will not work.

Software component prerequisites

The following SQL Server components must be installed and running on the computer that is running SQL Server before you install Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011:

SQL word breakers
This is only required for some Microsoft Dynamics CRM language editions. For more information about word breaker versions for languages supported by SQL Server see Word Breakers and Stemmers (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=127754).
SQL Server Agent service
SQL Server Full Text Indexing

The following components must be installed and running on the computer where Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011 will be installed:

Services
- Indexing Service
  
  To install this service, see the Windows Server documentation.
- IIS Admin
- World Wide Web Publishing
Windows Data Access Components (MDAC) 6.0 (This is the default version of MDAC with Windows Server 2008.)
Microsoft ASP .NET (Must be registered, but does not have to be running.)

Regards,

Imran