First of all, this is my 300th post on this blog!

Now back to topic at hand:

CRM for Outlook is one of big differentiating features for Dynamics CRM in the CRM segment of products.

Sometimes though it can lead you into issues into undocumented territory. I was trying to get CRM 2015 for Outlook installed during analysis for one of my clients on Outlook 2010 with IE 11 installed on the machine.

Surprisingly, the installer will not install. On tracing, I found the following error:

11:57:11| Error| You cannot use a version of Internet Explorer that is earlier than Internet Explorer 8.
11:57:11| Info| Currently unsupported version is Internet Explorer 0.

The thing with CRM is whenever you think you have seen lot of weird issues, it brings something to the screen which is unchartered territory.

We have IE 11 installed with a supported configuration for CRM 2015, still the error is saying that IE version is less than 8, on tops Info log says that it is 0.

Awesome!

Ok, my digging started for Solutions. I saw solutions like this one:

· Repair Office: Didn’t work for me and also for people in community

· Reset Internet explorer: Didn’t work for me and also for people in community.

Issue Resolution: Here is the solution that worked:

Go and locate the following Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version = 9.0.0.0 in my case

Check the value for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Default

This might be blank, copy the value from Version into this key value and restart your machine.

Try installing Outlook Client for CRM again, issue should be resolved now.

Hope it helps and Happy CRMing as usual!

If you liked the post, Please leave feedback – it is important to keep writing content that you really need!

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In case you guys might have missed the top performing articles, here is a quick refresher:

For the first Quarter of 2016, Here are the top 10 blogs:

Hope it helps and Happy CRMing as usual!

If you liked the post, Please leave feedback – it is important to keep writing content that you really need!

Do share in your networks, LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook!

Recently I have been involved in analysing data migration analysis from a third party CRM system into our great product – Dynamics CRM.

Let me add a quick one liner for a good practice as well!

I really appreciate the efforts from the client as they understood the need of doing a Data migration analysis, as in such projects that is one of the main pillars for Success of the project.

Well, coming back to the issue at hand here. Client wanted to import Created on Date as well for historical references. CRM import wizard started throwing following weird error on the imports:

The date/time format is not valid, or the value is outside the supported range

Issue resolution is quite simple:

Select the date/time column in Excel and then right click and choose “Format Cells” and choose one of the relevant category format i.e: Date and choose the format that relates to the date time format of the system, then save and try to import again

Please note: Correct format is very important, so be careful English(UK) is different from English(US) for instance.

Hope it helps and Happy CRMing as usual!

If you liked the post, Please leave feedback – it is important to keep writing content that you really need!

Do share in your networks, LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook!

Have you been getting lot of notifications on your Dynamics CRM message bar recently?

Well, it’s a good thing all right to have messages for different features/errors/warnings available in the product. The amount of messages in the notification can become overwhelming. Here are some of the common messages you can see. I have just tried to collate a few here and resolution:

· Interactive Service hub for CRM 2016: There is no supported way to get this one removed yet.

· Apps for CRM including Outlook App: There is a system setting for this one:

Here it is: (Settings->Administration –> System Settings) under General Tab

· Enable server based SharePoint integration: The only way to resolve this one is to configure server based integration.

· Sometimes you might wish to get users CRM for tablets app message.

Here it is: (Settings->Administration –> System Settings) under General Tab

· Alerts in CRM 2015 onwards: Here is a cool article to get rid of this one here:

http://www.infinite-x.net/2015/02/23/system-wide-alerts-in-dynamics-crm-2015/

· Welcome message for Dynamics CRM , aka “Welcome Lady”

You can get it removed with this System setting

Here it is (Settings->Administration –> System Settings) under General Tab:

· Pending Email warning: This one can be removed by removing all Pending emails in the system. Here is the link for resolution: https://crmbusiness.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/crm-2013-how-to-get-rid-of-annoying-pending-email-warning-message/

Hope it helps and Happy CRMing!

If you have any feedback Please leave in comments, don’t forget to share in your networks on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Do not forget to follow the blog for more posts – there are around 300 posts to explore in this blog.

Back in October 2015, I had put a blog up for new and improved version of Security role browser:

https://dynamicsofdynamicscrm.com/2015/10/14/new-and-improved-utility-announcementsecurity-role-browser-for-dynamics-crm-20152015-update-1/

It’s not out there yet – due to number of fixes required which I found during testing.

Meanwhile, there is a small update for the browser. It will be now published as a paid product soon. The reasons behind this decision is to provide continuous support to the Security Role browser as an add-on with dedicated support and also to pay hosting costs required to keep this blog running with other initiatives you will see soon.
Here is a quick poll for you guys to give me feedback:

Hope it helps and Happy CRMing!

The reason for writing this blog is to make the audience understand why SPN is very important for a multi-box CRM on –premise installation.

Let’s first start from an error

Have you ever been on this screen on On-Premise CRM reports?

Experienced CRM consultants call it the dreadful CRM reporting error and there are variety of blogs which tell you the ways to solve this one.

This is one of the best documented ones: http://blog.simpletrees.com/2013/04/mscrm-and-dreaded-rsprocessingaborted.html

So, if you want the solution to the problem, you can stop here and refer the link mentioned above.

I wanted to go a bit ahead than that and mention why CRM administrators and consultants face this error?

9 out of 10 times this error is due to incorrect SPN configuration.

Well let me start by trying to put it in very simple fashion for Technical audience:

Put simply, an SPN (Service Principal Name) mapping allows a service on a particular server to be associated with an account responsible for the management of the service, thereby permitting mutual Kerberos Authentication. To use mutual Kerberos authentication, the Windows security layer must be able to determine the account that a service is using.

With an SPN map defined in Active Directory (AD), the Windows account responsible for the service can be ascertained and used for Kerberos authentication. This mapping is necessary because many clients will compose an SPN based on the hostname and port the client is connecting to. Many services register SPNs for this reason.

Didn’t understand this jargons spoken above?

Ok, let’s try to make it a little more understandable for the rest of us now in normal language.

CRM can have a database server separate to the Application Server (where IIS is hosted). For security purposes, it is advisable to run CRM as a service account which is also existed on Domain.

Similarly, it is advisable to run SQL server on the Database server in a separate service account on domain.

So, when SPN is not configured Application server is not able to authenticate SQL server as both are running under different accounts.

SPN creates a mapping so that Authentication can happen and thus reports start working most times after this is configured correctly.

Hope it helps and Happy CRMing!

Please do leave comments to share feedback and do share on your social networks.

Lot of you must have utilized the great Dashboard feature of CRM and charts available on it. There is a great feature available on charts.

Let’s take an example of Out of box Marketing Dashboard in a vanilla CRM:

If you need to get to underlying data, you just need to click the highlighted button:

Once you do it, underlying list will pop open for you, along with Chart available:

Cool, isn’t it?

Hope it helps and Happy CRMing!

If you have and feedback, Please leave in comments. Don’t forget to share on your networks.

Just finished installing CRM on-premise and was trying to document minimum privileges required to install CRM here.

The minimum permissions/rights for a user which can act as deployment manager, that is he/she is able to Create, import, Enable, disable and edit an organization are as follows:

I have breakdown required permissions component wise.

SQL Server:

On the computer that is running Microsoft SQL Server, the user must be a member of the following groups:

• The local administrators group
• The Microsoft SQL Server administrator group (i.e,SysAdmin)

Reporting Server:

On the computer that is running SQL Server Reporting Services, the user must have the following minimum privileges:

• Content Manager Role privileges at the root folder level
• System Administrator privileges at the site-wide setting level

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server:

On the computer where deployment manager is installed the user must be member of following group:

• The local administrators group
• Add the user as a deployment administrator.

Active Directory service:

The user must have permissions in the following Microsoft Dynamics CRM security groups in Active Directory:

• PrivReportingGroup
• PrivUserGroup
• SQLAccessGroup
• ReportingGroup
• UserGroup   

       Below are the required permissions in the security groups:

• Permissions
  • Read
  • Write
  • Add/Remove self as member
• Advanced permissions
  • List Contents
  • Read All Properties
  • Write All Properties
  • Read Permissions
  • Modify Permissions
  • All Validated Writes
  • Add/Remove self as member

Hope it helps and Happy CRMing!

If you have any feedback to share, Please leave in comments.

Today, I am posting a special thank you note to all my followers, readers and kudos to you for making this milestone happen for me.

In 2010-2011, I started my journey with this awesome product and in 2013 writing some articles on Dynamics CRM, developing some tools in my spare time and doing some trainings on it. Getting involved with various kind of experiences on Dynamics CRM.

This blog has over time been a keen source of inspiration for myself to keep learning, sharing ideas and connecting with some great minds. 

Thanks again and Happy CRMing!

If you have any feedback or want to share your views on my blog, Please mention in comments. It is highly appreciated.