MSCRM Book

From last few months, I am going through this book called XCRM as Rapid Application Development. This is one of best CRM book I come across for CRM developers. This book includes a lot sample code, helper classes and a lot of valuable tips to turn your CRM development team into a CRM sausage factory.

It is written by David Yack.

Thanks

Changing MSCRM Port number

Few months ago, One of my client asked me to change the CRM port number from 5555 to 80.
They were having some backup problems because of port 5555.
The process is very straight forward.

Step 1.
As usual take the backup of the orgname_MSCRM database.

Step 2.
Export all the customizations.

Step 3.
Go to IIS and change the port number of the MSCRM website to 80

Step 4.
Go to windows registry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM

a) Change the port number on ServerURL to your new port number

It looks like http://:5555/MSCRMServices.
To change the port number to 80 the url should look like
http:///MSCRMServices

b)Change the port number on LocalSdkPort to your new port number.

Check if the CRM is working.

Step 5.
Run the outlook configuration Wizard to change the outlook client.
Choose the option change your configuration and add new URL for the MSCRM Server.

Step 6.
Change the Email Router configuration. To do that

a) Go to Microsoft Dynamics CRM E-mail Router Configuration Manager.

b) On the Deployments tab, update any deployments that are set up to use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM server that uses the new URL.
c)Click Publish to save the changes.

You are ready to go.

I had a problem at this stage. Email Router configuration wizard did not accept the new SERVERURL.

So I downloaded CRM Deployment Configuration Tool from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6e211231-30fe-4df2-9b81-15cfb87adcf1.

Go to command prompt, type the path to the directory that contains the Microsoft.crm.deploymentconfigtool.exe file, and then run the following commands to correct this setting:

microsoft.crm.deploymentconfigtool addresssettings update -webapprootdomain:crmserver:portnumber
microsoft.crm.deploymentconfigtool addresssettings update -sdkrootdomain:crmserver:portnumber

That's it

Good Luck

Opportunity setstate plugin problems

Few months ago, I was writing a plugin on opportunity setstate. I registered the plugin using registeration tool. My plugin never get triggered. After messing around for few hours, I registered the plugin on SetStateDynamicEntity message. Even then when I closed the opportunity, the plugin did not trigger, did not matter if it's won or lost opportunity, But plugin did trigger when I reopened the closed opportunity. I tried a lot of different things and at the end I registerfed my pluggin for win and lose message instead of setstate or setstatedynamicentity message. It worked this time.
I hope this will help some of you guys facing the same problem.

Have a nice weekend.

MSCRM Shop: Hidding unwanted views from the drop down

Hi

I came across this beautiful article from Darren:

http://msdynamicscrm-e.blogspot.com/2008/02/hiding-view-in-crm-40-using-plug-in.html

Upgrade sbs MSCRM 3.0 to MSCRM 4.0

Recently, we did an upgrade for one of our client from SBS MSCRM 3.0 to 4.0.
Everything was going great and suddenly we got an error message

Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.MsiInstallServerAction failed.This patch package could not be opened. Verify that the patch package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package.

Till this point we did not have any problem. After the error message CRM stops working. We did not find any component of MSCRM 4.0 installed.

We tried all sort of things but nothing worked. The problem was upgrade wizard could not find the installation package. It was looking for the package at some temporary internet files location.

The problem was caused by the update installation files step of the upgrade.

We tried to go ahead with the update without updating the files. It worked. We apply the the hotfixes after the installation.

MSCRM Hot fixes and Updates

Here the link for all the latest hot fixes and updates for MSCRM 4.0

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949256/en-us

Spell Checker

A lot of clients ask us to add a spell checker to CRM email templates . There is free spell checker available called IESpell, which can be downloaded from http://www.iespell.com/. Plz check the term and condition on the web site. Install the software. Add a custom button on the CRM form and call the IESpell. It looks like

The spell check can be added to any page of CRM.

If you need further assissatnce contact me at asingh75@gmail.com.