Tag: update rollup

Update Rollups, Service Packs, Major Releases: Understanding Dynamics CRM Versioning
When it comes to commercial software, there’s often times a difference between what the engineering department calls their product versions and how the marketing department decides to label the product for the end customers. For example, after Windows 3.1 the commercial name of the product changed to “Windows XP” while the underlying version number progressed to 4.00. After various changes in both product and naming strategy of the OS, we’re now using a product called “Windows 8.1” when its actual technical version number is 6.3…

Just like with Windows, Dynamics CRM also has version numbers that are different from the names you’ll see in marketing materials and end user documentation. These numbers are relevant to anyone who needs to either maintain and administer a Dynamics CRM environment or customize and develop solutions for the product, since you need to be aware of the changes introduced by various updates to Dynamics CRM.

Before CRM 2013 there wasn’t a convenient way through which you could have determined the installed updates by just looking at the version number, since each Update Rollup just had a seemingly random four digit build number assigned to it. Luckily the latest releases have made the version numbers much more user friendly, by starting to follow the standard “major.minor.update.build” pattern. There’s still a few CRM specific things you need to be aware of, especially with the very latest releases, which is why I thought now’s a good time to draw some attention to the topic.

Starting with CRM 2013, the version numbering scheme follows a pattern like this (notice the bold numbers):
- Major Release
  - Name: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
  - Version number: 6.0.0.xxxx
- Service Pack:
  - Name: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Service Pack 1
  - Version number: 6.1.0.xxxx
- Update Rollup:
  - Name: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Update Rollup 1
  - Version number: 6.0.1.xxxx
The build numbers are of course not “xxxx” in reality but I left them out since they’re not something you should actively need to remember. Just bookmark this page and reference it whenever you need to know the detailed number of a particular release: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and 2011 Update Rollups and Service Packs: Release Dates, Build Numbers, and Collateral.

I’ll go through these levels in a reversed order, since I think that makes up for a more exciting story line here. Also, I think it’s more likely to resemble the real life process via which you’ll encounter each of these versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM after your initial deployment. You’ll certainly need to be aware of the different versions even prior to setting up your very first demo/test/development environment, but keeping up with the Dynamics CRM releases is a job that never ends!

Update Rollups

These are collections of hotfixes to existing product functionality. When you open a support ticket with Microsoft for an issue you’ve encountered with the software, sometimes you might receive an individual hotfix package from them that fixes your specific issue (and nothing else). Normally you wouldn’t need to install each and every hotfix separately, however, as most of these fixes will eventually be released in an Update Rollup package. You’ll see a list of “issues that are resolved” in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article of each Update Rollup, which is normally your best indication of whether the software bug you’ve encountered has been squashed.

<rant>Since the official name of these releases is “Update Rollup”, the official acronym for them would logically be “UR”. However, some people seem to happily forget about the first word and instead call them “RU”, presumably as a shorthand from “RollUp”. Fine, call them whatever you want, even give each of the releases your very own pet names if you wish, but you’ll never, ever see me use anything but “UR” on my blog.</rant>

At the time of writing, the latest released version for CRM 2013 is Update Rollup 3, version number 6.0.3.0106. It was released on July 15th and contains over 200 hotfixes as listed on the KB article. Normally there would be a UR3 package released for all the server and client components, but this time there’s no Outlook version available, since apparently none of the hotfixes required the client bits to be updated. Update Rollups are usually cumulative, so CRM 2013 UR3 also contains the fixes from UR1 and UR2.

If you don’t manually download and install the UR’s, they will also be distributed via Windows Update later on once Microsoft makes them available via this channel. Since you should always test the effects of each UR prior to production deployment, it’s usually never a good idea to just let things run on autopilot. For example, letting your Outlook clients get the UR’s via the Windows Update schedule without keeping your server components up to date will soon land you in unsupported territory.

Service Packs

During it’s first 11 years of existence, there weren’t any official Service Packs released for Dynamics CRM, unlike many other Microsoft products. This changed a couple of months ago when CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 was released on May 28th. Even though MS is mostly referring to it by the name Spring ’14 release in their marketing messages, based on the naming policy of CRM Online, the SP1 version is essentially Spring ’14 for on-premises customers and the Outlook client components (even for CRM Online customers).

While the CRM 2013 SP1 KB article looks like any UR article we’ve come to know, with a list of resolved issues, this isn’t just a collection of hotfixes. Service Packs are the delivery mechanism for new product features as well as changes to existing functionality of the product. An example of this would be the case creation and routing features introduced in SP1. For a more complete list of SP1 contents, refer to the “What’s New” page on CRM Customer Center. Note that in order to access some of the new features, you’ll not only need to install the SP1 bits onto the server but also go to the CRM organization’s settings menu and apply “Install Product Updates” from there.

Service Packs are cumulative in the sense that they contain the previously released Update Rollup hotfixes. So, while CRM 2013 UR1 and UR2 were released prior to SP1, you don’t need to install them separately when setting up a new Dynamics CRM 2013 environment. Just grab the Service Pack and you’re all patched up to that point.

Update Rollups for Service Packs

Now this is where it really gets interesting. Remember that latest CRM 2013 Update Rollup 3 I linked to a few paragraphs earlier? Based on our discussion so far, would you assume it to contain all the fixes, updates and new features released for CRM 2013 so far? I see quite a number of nodding heads out there and I’m not at all surprised if your initial assumption would be “of course”. The correct answer, however, is “no”. Due to the counter-intuitive nature of this situation for any Dynamics CRM veterans, an explanation is surely in order here. (more…)
July 17, 2014
eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome takeaways
There are no more Microsoft Convergence events held in Europe, but luckily the eXtreme CRM organization has stepped in to arrange a bi-annual conference where all the Dynamics CRM professionals can meet up and share information & thoughts on what’s happening around the product and the surrounding ecosystem. Last year in Berlin was the first time I attended the eXtreme CRM conference and this year it was time to head down south to Rome for eXtreme CRM 2013. Here’s my travel report from the event, focusing on the product roadmap details that were revealed and the direction that Microsoft Dynamics CRM seems to be heading towards, based on my interpretation.

It’s been a bit rough

The opening keynote by Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, was a somewhat unusual appearance compared to the traditional Microsoft way of highlighting their past achievements and future opportunities. From the European viewpoint, the typical US style keynotes often go over the top in building up hype for the success of the products, but Bob came onto the stage with a different kind of a message. Basically he apologized for all the problems that have surrounded Dynamics CRM recently: the delay of cross-browser support, CRM Online performance/reliability issues and the sad saga of recent Update Rollups being pulled.

I think most of the MS partners in the room had shared the pain from these issues, especially when having to explain them on a day-to-day basis while working with customers. In the software business it’s of course nothing unheard of that such problems may occur, but there’s been an elevated sense of frustration recently with the lack of information given to partners on what’s going on at Microsoft. Communication is the most effective cure in recovering from such events and I bet that it would have been far easier for all parties if there had been more transparent exchange of information on each of these issues earlier on, but it’s good to see the top management acknowledge this now and hopefully do what is necessary to straighten these things out.

One thing that Bob Stutz promised to change was to return the Update Rollups back to pure hotfix packages instead of vehicles for new feature delivery that they’ve turned into after Microsoft adopted the agile release policy for Dynamics CRM shortly after the 2011 version came out. What this means in practice is that MS will need to come up with a new delivery vehicle for introducing the new features into on-premise CRM environments at least once a year. While this can potentially improve the stability of those environments, the gap between CRM Online and on-premise feature release schedule can also grow even larger as a result of this, which could introduce it’s own challenges through an increased platform fragmentation.

The mobility story

This time last year Microsoft made a big announcement of their upcoming “CRM Anywhere” prodcut offering. Following the aforementioned turn of events, the cross-browser support got eventually delayed up until Polaris / Update Rollup 12 while the mobile strategy was gradually revised, scrapping their planned partnership with CWR Mobility and opting to develop in-house mobile apps instead. Individual pieces of news around the mobility offering have become available during the past fall and now at eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome the following mobility roadmap slide was presented:

From this slide and the accompanying presentation I was able to pick out the following pieces of data:
- The iPad Safari web client that was postponed from the actual Polaris rollout is arriving this month for CRM Online customers, on-premise support will be in Orion
- Tablet devices will receive a dedicated app, not only the Windows 8 Sales Workspace but also a similar iPad native app appears to be scheduled for Orion, with further Service and Marketing apps in the horizon
- iPhone and Android support will be limited to the Mobile Express client even after Orion, all the way until Leo
- No details on whether Windows Phone will receive any new features in addition to the WP7 Activity Feeds app that was released a bit over year ago
- Customization options as well as offline data support will be rolled out gradually to these clients
One thing that Bob was emphasizing during the keynote was Microsoft’s decision not to charge additional licenses for access to these mobile and tablet applications. Choosing to take the longer route of build vs. buy in the mobile CRM gives MS a wider range of options to adjust their commercial offering to market needs, but the prolonged period of uncertainty means that many customers will also be postponing their investment decisions on mobile CRM deployment until they have facts available on what level of functionality is going to be baked into the core platform. At the same time ISV’s like Resco and more recently also CWR Mobility are working hard to be able to offer a HTML5 platform for developing customized mobile and tablet apps for Dynamics CRM for those customers who need to equip their mobile workforce with CRM solutions already today.

Update 2013-02-16: Microsoft partners can now download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobility Roadmap slide deck from PartnerSource (login required).

From Polaris to Orion via Gemini

The new “Flow” UI of Dynamics CRM has been rolled out to existing CRM Online customers. This has caused both a lot of excitement as well as anxiety, since the new design and integrations (Bing Maps, Yammer etc.) are very tempting to be demonstrated as the next generation user experience, but the feature set of Polaris takes away many of the standard customization options that rely on form event scripting. I’ve covered the Polaris new features & gotchas in a previous post, in case you haven’t had a chance to dig deeper into the updated CRM Online version yet. Just to repeat once more what I’ve been trying to emphasize ever since latest Statement of Direction document was released: on-premise customers won’t get the new UI with Update Rollup 12, it arrives in the Orion release.

With that in mind, let’s get the big news out of the way before digging any deeper: Orion is not an Update Rollup or even Service Update type of a release, it is the next major version of Dynamics CRM. In his closing keynote Bill Patterson pretty much confirmed that it would be called “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013” (or 2014) for the on-premise customers. Not a whole lot of other details were shared, apart from the fact that the target release date is in Q3 2013. Although Bob Stutz was hesitant on giving any dates in his speech, July was mentioned more than once, but whether that refers to general availability or CRM Online is anybody’s guess as of now.

Before that, we’ll have time for another star in the spring sky: Gemini. Yes, it looks like there will be even more frequent releases for CRM Online than previously communicated. Gemini arrives in Q2 2013 and will focus on bringing the Marketing Pilot features acquired last October available to Dynamics CRM users. The feature set was shown in a very brief run through of slides, since the network issues that plagued the whole eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome event held at Marriott Park Hotel forced Bill to skip the live demo and resort to screenshots instead. Not much can be said about what to expect from Marketing Pilot at this stage, but here are some facts I picked up: (more…)
February 7, 2013
Using the updated Activity Feeds to monitor Queues

As a part of the CRM Online Polaris update and the on-premise Update Rollup 12, new functionality has been added to the Activity Feeds solution. In fact, it’s no longer a separate solution but rather converted into a part of the Default Solution during the upgrade to Polaris / UR12 (see this YouTube video for details). Yeah, I know you were thinking that Activity Feeds are on their way out as the Yammer integration arrives, but the reality is that the auto posts functionality will still remain a CRM platform component, although the data itself may be presented through the common Yammer UI.

We’ll see how it goes in practice once the Yammer integration arrives in February (hopefully for on-prem, too, although no official info on that yet), but we’re already free to explore the enhancements of the updated Activity Feeds. In addition to the great new feature of being able to filter the records from where posts are shown in your feed instead of having to go and follow each and every interesting record, there’s also another important addition: the support for organization owned entities. Previously you couldn’t add the Record Wall onto entities like competitor but now such limitations have been lifted.

Another interesting entity that could well benefit from the Activity Feeds style of presenting the latest updates is the queue entity. Although queues themselves are a useful feature for process automation and routing tasks between users, their usability in the out-of-the-box configuration of Dynamics CRM is fairly poor. Unless you’re a full time service rep working on queues, it’s not a very intuitive way for monitoring work to be done and who’s working on what, let alone getting notified of something added into a queue that you should do something about.

Enter Activity Feeds. With the ability of having the actions in queue item updates being reflected in a timeline that allows people to also comment on the progress of these items, all of a sudden the whole queue concept can become a lot more accessible to casual CRM users. Following the relevant queues you want to receive updates from is as easy as following your teams’ accounts, and with the new filters in Polaris/UR12 update there’s even more possibilities for creating views of only specific types of queue items.

There are no standard post configuration rules available for the queue or queue item entity, so you’ll have to build the auto post rules by using workflow processes. Although the users will prefer to follow queues and not queue items, what you as a system administrator or customizer will want to do is create workflow rules for queue items and reference the related queue as a regarding object. This will allow users to see Activity Feed posts when new items are added into queues they are following, when their “worked by” information changes etc.

With the new social dashboards introduced in Polaris, it’s ever more likely that users will encounter the What’s New section when logging into CRM. Why not make the most of this and configure a few new rules for creating auto posts that surface relevant and interesting information to the users on what’s happening with the various processes that Dynamics CRM is used for managing?

January 31, 2013
What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Polaris Release: The Slides
On January 21st, 2013 the official announcement on “broader availability” of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update (formerly known by codename Polaris) was made on the CRM Connection blog. Even though not all the CRM Online organizations have yet been updated, new trials in US and shortly in EMEA & APAC will get the latest functionality installed upon provisioning.

The absolutely best way to get familiar with the future UI of Dynamics CRM is to get a 30 day trial organization for yourself and play around with the demo data. In fact for a large share of the existing customers this will be the only possible way, since there will be no on-premise version of Polaris. You’ll get the cross-browser support, API updates, and, contrary to previous information, the updated Activity Feeds solution when installing Update Rollup 12 for your CRM server (currently not yet available for download after having been pulled). Sorry, you’ll have to wait for the Orion release that’s coming out sometime later in the year 2013.

Since I know many of you must be busy with deploying, supporting, developing and actually using the current on-prem version of CRM 2011, I’ve created a summary of the new features in the December 2012 Service Update just for you. No, not just a list of the bullet points that Microsoft has already communicated, but rather a hands-on exploration of how the new version works differently from the old CRM 2011. You’ll find it on SlideShare available for download or you can view it below (although the image quality in the streamed version is a bit crappy).

The 34 slides cover those features I personally found noteworthy when getting to know the Polaris release. It’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but I’ve tried to highlight the changes and gotchas that a system customizer or administrator familiar with the previous versions should be aware of. The topics include:
- Sitemap changes
- Activity Feeds filters (see this earlier post for more details)
- New process form structure and components (previously known as the “Flow UI”)
- Swithing between new and Classic forms
- Updated subgrids and limitations on working with related records in general
- Extended case management functionality
- Support for creating leads for existing accounts
- + Many more!
With this release Microsoft has done an excellent job with publishing a plethora of training videos on the Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update on the Microsoft Dynamics YouTube channel for anyone to watch, with no login required to access the materials on Customer/PartnerSource, so do take advantage of them. Unfortunately I haven’t yet found an official MS index page to these videos, so I suggest you refer to this post by Donna Edwards with the video links, because the video titles are impractically long when browsed on YouTube (hmm, wonder if this says anything about Microsoft’s product naming convention… probably not 😉 )

And that’s not all, folks! By browsing through the updated Resource Center content online you can access detailed help articles on topics such as installing product updates, turn on the new sales and service process forms or customizing the forms in the new sales process. There’s so much more to this release than just the cross-browser support (although that’s bound to keep people busy as CRM 4.0 scripts start to break) that I urge you to have a look, even if you’re not working on a CRM Online environment. By starting early you’ll have a better understanding of how to prepare for the next on-premise release, what comes out of the box in Polaris and what type of customizations are sensible to make when knowing the upcoming form architecture and user experience that will arrive in the Orion release.
January 21, 2013
Windows 8, Outlook 2013 and Dynamics CRM – part 2

Back in August I wrote about my initial experiences of using a Windows 8 PC with Office 2013 to connect the Outlook client to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. During that time we only had the preview versions of both the OS and Office, so some quirks were naturally to be expected. Now that Windows 8 is generally available and also the RTM bits of Office 2013 can be downloaded from MSDN (with commercial launch expected by end of January), it’s a good moment to revisit the topic. Upon my latest test I came across a few configuration gotchas that I though might be useful to share for anyone who’s struggling with the same issues.

Connecting to CRM Online with WLID

Our official work setup is still on Windows 7 / Office 2010 level, but being the kind of eager early adopter that I am, my home PC’s have moved to the brave new world of Windows 8 some time ago already. I installed Office Professional Plus 2013 on a Windows 8 64-bit laptop that’s not joined to a domain, so my login credentials to Windows are linked to my Microsoft Account (previously known as Windows Live ID). In my first tests in August this was a blocker for using a CRM Online organization where the user’s WLID / Microsoft Account was different in CRM and on the local machine.

Update Rollup 11 removed the need to manually enable Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) on Windows 8, but out of old habits I checked that it was available before configuring CRM. Launching the CRM client Configuration Wizard and selecting CRM Online on the Server URL field of the Configure Organizations prompt gave a familiar error: “Cannot connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM server because we cannot authenticate your credentials.” Just like before, it appears that the Configuration Wizard automatically attempts to use the Microsoft Account of the local user for logging in to CRM Online. Logging out of the account in Internet Explorer and then logging in to CRM Online in the browser didn’t seem to resolve the issue with the Outlook client connectivity, as a further error message was presented later in the Initializing the Organization phase:

There is a problem communicating with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM server. The server might be unavailable. Try again later. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator.
[Expanded Information]
Unable to load the native components of SQL Server Compact corresponding to the ADO.NET provider of version 8082. Install the correct version of SQL Server Compact. Refer to KB article 974247 for more details.

The KB article referenced in the error message discusses the following issue: “You receive an error message when you run a SQL Server Compact 3.5-based application after you install the 32-bit version of SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Service Pack 2 on an x64 computer.” However, downloading and installing the x64 version of Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 Service Pack 2 for Windows Desktop didn’t resolve the CRM configuration error, so I opened a support ticket with Microsoft. They instructed me that I also needed to install the Cumulative Update 2 for SQL Server Compact 3.5 Service Pack 2, which is a hotfix that you need to request a download link to be sent to you by email. After my SQL CE 3.5 had been updated to build 3.5.8082.00, I was finally able to connect my Outlook 2013 with our CRM Online demo organization.

Connecting to CRM on-premise with IFD

During the previous test with CRM Online I had also tried to connect the Outlook 2013 CRM client to our production on-premise CRM server that is IFD configured. I kept receiving the following error: “Cannot connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM server because we cannot authenticate your credentials. Check your connection or contact your administrator for more help.” Looking at the error details there was a message claiming “no credentials are available in the security package.” (more…)

January 12, 2013
The new Polaris UI in practice
CRM Online users may have already started thinking about when their organization would be getting the December 2012 Service Update. The good news is that we have an actual release date now, but the bad news is that it’s not in December 2012. Check out this link for more details, including the release date for cross-browser support for on-prem CRM in the form of Update Rollup 12.

Anyway, as we await for the new process flow oriented user experience to be enabled in the cloud, here’s some nice live footage of how the new UI works in practice. In this YouTube video Reuben Krippner walks us through the changes you can expect to see in your CRM once the ~~December 2012~~ Service Update has been applied.

Some things worth paying attention to in the video include:
- The browser client running on Chrome (including administrative UI)
- New social dashboard including the Activity Feeds web part
- Inline editing and adding of subgrid items (notice the lack of any save buttons)
- Recording a completed phone call directly on the lead form
- Lookup existing contacts or accounts from the Process Control component
- Transition from a lead to an opportunity without any popup window appearing
- Moving forward and backward freely in the process stages
- Editing process stage fields with the Process Control Customization Tool
- The new forms in the customization UI (and the lack of support for any form scripts in this release)
- Simplified UI of the iPad Sales Experience browser client on Safari
December 14, 2012
Future stars: Dynamics CRM roadmap news from Las Vegas
We didn’t yet get a new Statement of Direction or Release Preview Guide for the future releases of Microsoft Dynamics CRM from today’s eXtreme CRM 2012 Las Vegas keynote by Craig Dewar, titled “Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Now and In the Future”. That is scheduled to happen next week, but who wants to wait around for the information that has been shared to the privileged few who attended the eXtreme CRM session?

Lucky for us who weren’t able to go to Vegas, the best new bits revealed at the session were tweeted out by outstanding #MSDYNCRM community contributors like Neil Benson, Shawn Tabor, Brad Koontz, Bob Hatcher and Eric W Cahoon. Here’s a “best of #eXtremeCRM tweets” collection that tries to summarize what was presented in Dewar’s session.

Q4 2012: Polaris

Let’s start with the updates coming in the very near future. The next release is codenamed “Polaris” will be out in Q4 2012, so this is the “Fall 2012” release we saw on an earlier roadmap slide. More specifically, the new functionality will be delivered ~~as a part of Update Rollup 12 during December 2012 for both on-premise and~~ for CRM Online customers.

Polaris will contain upgrades to the browser UI as seen in the WPC 2012 session in July. It will include the Process Driven Refresh UI and deliver a more “flat” user experience to better match the look & feel of Office 2013. Also, the cross-browser support originally scheduled for Q2 2012 Service Update will now be delivered in December with UR12 and this part will affect also on-premise and hosted CRM environments. The previously delayed custom workflow activity support for CRM Online will be delivered within the same UR12 update schedule.

New announcements made at the eXtreme CRM keynote for Q4 2012 include click-to-call integration with Lync and Skype (both of which are Microsoft products these days, in case you forgot). CRM ~~Online~~ customers will get a simple Bing Maps integration with maps embedded on the customer forms. Presumably the CRM ~~Online~~ subscription will in the future include a license to use Bing Maps on an internal application ~~whereas customers who’ve bought perpetual server and client licenses from Microsoft need to acquire a separate license to use the mapping functionality through the API~~ (remember: it’s not a free service, like the Bing Maps or Google Maps website).

Q2 2013: Orion

The release after Polaris carries the codename “Orion” and is scheduled for Q2 2013. ~~What’s special about this release is that it will be CRM Online only. Whether on-premises and hosted CRM clients will be completely left without updates in Q2 remains to be seen, but~~ the new release cadence suggest only a single major update for on-premises customers per year. The Update Rollup release schedule with an 8 week cycle should still remain unchanged, though, so it’s likely to be a bit of a mixed bag of what’s really “Online only” in terms of new or changed functionality. Update: it’s actually the Q4 2012 Polaris that will be Online only, see the comments at the end from Craig Dewar.

As I’ve already speculated for a long time, the new Agaves in Office 2013 apps will be used as the means to deliver Dynamics CRM support for Outlook Web Access, both in OWA and MOWA (mobile app). This will finally enable tracking content from your inbox into CRM without having to live with the Outlook desktop client legacy. Also the synchronizing of items from Exchange will be possible on the server side with the Orion release in Q2 2013.

Yammer integration, which presumably goes much deeper than the current integration solution built by Yammer before being acquired by Microsoft, is scheduled for Q2 2013. Other than this, concreted evidence of bringing social channels into Dynamics CRM was not leaked from Vegas, so we’ll need to wait a bit longer to see how Microsoft intends to deliver on the social story they’ve been promoting for CRM since this time last year. Back when we were still talking about Polaris as the R9 release this was supposed to connect Dynamics CRM with the external communities in a big way, but no major announcements have so far been made on this front.

Ok, I did spot one physical evidence of social CRM from the Extreme CRM announcements, in the form of a new Social CRM solution built by Sonoma Partners. It’s baked into the updated version of CRM Demo Builder, which now allows you to provision CRM + SharePoint on the same, shared Office 365 platform, thus achieving single sign-on. Whether this particular Social CRM app will be made available to all CRM customers is something I’m not yet sure, but it looks like quite a solid little app for bringing Twitter feeds into CRM by using the same look & feel as the previous Activity Feeds solution. You can promote tweets into new/existing leads, contacts, accounts, cases or opportunities, after which you see the original tweet in CRM as an Activity Feed post. Nothing revolutionary in itself, but a welcome feature, if something like this is actually on Microsoft’s roadmap.

That’s all of the news I picked up so far from the event by following the social networks. Did I miss any interesting tweet from #eXtremeCRM or an important piece of news? Leave a comment & let’s assemble the pieces of the Dynamics CRM roadmap together!

Update 2012-09-04: I received clarification on the release roadmap from Craig Dewar himself, here’s the update:
- “Polaris due Q4 2012 is online only with one exception. There is one capability in Polaris namely cross browser that is of such high interest we will release that capability on premise also.”
- “Orion due Q2 2013 is online and on premise. It will include all Polaris functionality in addition to many new capabilities.”
Based on my interpretation of the above, CRM Online customers will get the Polaris functionality first, while on premise and hosted CRM customers receive these updates 6 months later when Orion comes out.
October 2, 2012
To update or not to Update Rollup? That is the question
Some time ago I wrote a parody about Dynamics CRM blogs that mainly seem to post news about the latest Update Rollups being released. Now I find myself writing an Update Rollup blog post myself. Is that a sign that I’ve run out of topics and slipped into the autopilot blogging mode? I hope not, but after reading quite a lot about the latest Update Rollup 10 for Dynamics CRM 2011 I decided to contribute a bit into the discussion.

It’s always great to receive improvements to the software you spend all your days working with, isn’t it? Compared to a product like Java which Oracle promises to patch only four times a year, even if it’s about critical security updates (did you remember to uninstall your Java 7 yet?), Microsoft is doing quite an OK job with their update process and we see a steady stream of releases to make Dynamics CRM better one bit at a time. Even though Update Rollup 9 was cancelled after the beta program, MS is now back on track with their release schedule in the form of UR10 that came out two weeks ago.

We have once again a great in-depth article from Dynamics CRM in the Field about all things Update Rollup 10. It tells all the details of the story from Microsoft’s perspective, but let’s evaluate the ups & downs of this latest release from the Dynamics CRM community perspective to get a complete picture, shall we? OK, here goes:

The Ups

There was quite a number of fixes promised for the CRM Outlook client in Update Rollup 10 that would potentially solve some of the stability issues many users have encountered when trying to use the CRM Outlook client for actual work in their environment. It’s now 2 years since the first beta of the completely rewritten Dynamics CRM Outlook client came out and many of us are certainly hoping that it would have reached a mature enough level where you don’t have to be afraid of if causing a flood of tickets to your helpdesk. Yes, some users may be quite happy with it as it is, but you’d be foolish not to prepare for potential issues when planning a large scale deployment of the Outlook client. Reaching that good ol’ Service Pack 2 type of confidence level would be just great.

Another promising deliverable from UR10 is the improvements to query performance on large data sets. A new version of the performance optimization whitepaper has been released alongside the update, which describes the new options made available to tune the Quick Find performance. If you read the results of these tests by Chris Cognetta where the query time was decreased by over 80% in an environment with 1.5 million rows, it’s obvious this is an update worth paying attention to if you have or expect to have some “big data” in your CRM system.

Finally, as many MSDN subscribers are now eagerly updating their PC’s to run Windows 8, Internet Explorer and even the Office 2013 Preview, the added support for all of these in CRM 2011 Update Rollup 10 is reason enough to grab the very latest CRM bits. Just don’t forget that UR10 alone is not enough, there’s some things you should know about Windows 8 RTM & CRM 2011.

The Downs

So, we now have a Quick Find that is working faster, which means it must be doing something differently, right? It is, and unfortunately in some cases this will result in a Generic SQL Error message being shown to the user. It appears that the new update is not quite comfortable dealing with a set of Quick Find columns that contains address fields. As some of you may remember, the address 1 & address 2 fields on the account & contact forms are actually not stored in the same database table as the rest of the default fields, rather they reside in the CustomerAddressBase table. The UR10 version of Quick Find may therefore not work properly if you try to search for records based on address fields like city or zip code. Yes, Microsoft says using these as search fields is against best practices, but the users will very often want to narrow down the customer data based on geographic variables, so taking it away from them can only act as a workaround until we have a new hotfix from MS.

CRM developers might not be too concerned with performing actual queries on live customer data, but they will certainly be annoyed when encountering the following prompt after editing a JavaScript web resource: You have exceeded the maximum number of 200 characters in this field; it will be truncated. Doh! Making small changes to script files just became very tedious until Update Rollup 11 rolls along in 2 months time. Again, there’s a workaround to it (don’t use the editor, instead upload the file or use some helpful web resource tool from CodePlex), but it doesn’t really make anyone want to rush UR10 onto all their servers.

Then we have stories of people applying UR10 and finding they can’t access any of their CRM organizations, due to an unhandled exception: Method not found: ‘Void Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Query.FilterExpression.set_IsQuickFindFilter(Boolean)’. Uninstalling UR10 appears to be the only known cure for this show stopper, which obviously is related to the aforementioned Quick Find changes on some level.

Alternatively, if you’ve updated your CRM server from 4.0 to 2011, you may experience errors when trying to import a solution file: The element ‘savedquery’ has incomplete content. List of possible elements expected: ‘LocalizedNames’. Manually editing the XML to remove a view prior to importing the file is the available workaround, but again it can make the life of a system customizer quite difficult until there’s a fix available.

OMG, what should we do with these UR’s?!

The short answer is: always test first, then evaluate the ups & downs for your particular case. If you are struggling with the Outlook client, face performance issues with your huge CRM database or simply want to run CRM 2011 on Windows 8, going for Update Rollup 10 may be perfectly sensible for you. For someone who doesn’t have a compelling need to update, you may well decide to wait a bit longer and no one should blame you for it.

That’s pretty much how it is with any Update Rollup. In reality there’s never going to be the perfect time to update. Knowing ahead what hotfixes will deliver the biggest gains for you or potentially break your CRM deployment would be a great skill to have. Instead of dreaming about it, here’s a few guiding principles I would recommend you to follow:
- Always test the updates in your own test environment before planning live deployment. A virtual machine with your solutions & data is a good compromise, identical hardware is for people with enterprise level budgets (and problems).
- Never be the first to update, always wait a couple of weeks from the release and read the CRM forums for experiences from others. Trust the wisdom of the crowds.
- Coordinate the server and client update schedules to limit possible issues and maximize the benefits from the updates. While mixed environments tend to be supported, why risk it?
- Do update your CRM. Staying too far behind in this “cloud first” era can soon turn out to be an expensive strategy, so reserve adequate time and resources for keeping your CRM up to date – on a regular schedule.
Do you have any words of advise for people who are struggling with the “should I update to Update Rollup X” question? What’s your survival strategy?

Edit 2012-09-09: Based on the discussions on the Dynamics CRM Forum, I’ve created a new wiki page for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 10 on the CRM Wiki on Technet. The purpose is to provide a single place where the Dynamics CRM community members could share their information on potential issues and known problems that they encounter when applying the latest Update Rollups, as well as naturally links to any solutions or workarounds that can help others who are struggling with the same problem. I’ve initially added links to 10 suspected issues with UR10, but you are very welcome to contribute by adding new links or additional information to the wiki page. In an ideal world, we could have similar pages for each new rollup that gets released and be able to more easily identify both the benefits and the dangers or applying the updates into our CRM environments. Let’s see if the wiki can serve us as a platform for such information sharing.
August 30, 2012
CRM Anywhere not here yet, Q2 2012 Service Update functionality delayed until Q4 2012

The big question on the minds of many Dynamics CRM customers and consultants has lately been: when is the Q2 2012 Service Update / R8 / Update Rollup 9 / “CRM Anywhere” update going to be released? Even though Microsoft has a policy of not announcing any official dates for new software releases beforehand, the agile release policy they announced back in Q2 2011 as well as the name of the update announced in February 2012 were all indicating that a release was imminent before the end of Q2 2012. Since then, we’ve seen Q2 turn into Q3 and no news has been shared regarding the planned schedule for the release. Until now, that is. On July 6th 2012 we finally received an announcement on what’s going on. Let me quote the important bit for you:

On July 19th, as we committed, our Q2 release will include Microsoft SQL Server 2012 support, Industry templates and certifications for our online service. After listening to the feedback from our customers and partners we are delaying availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile and cross-browser support. These were previously scheduled to be delivered in the Q2 2012 Service Update, and we now plan to deliver them in the service update scheduled for Q4 2012.

In short, “CRM Anywhere” has been postponed from Q2 2012 to Q4 2012. A six month delay on using Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and any non-PC hardware. Well isn’t that just splendid. I’m sure none of the Microsoft partners had started selling the Dynamics CRM product to any Macintosh shops in preparation for Q2 2012…

OK, I won’t bash MS about this any more than the above comment, because I fully understand the situation they are facing. To be honest, I’ve had some serious doubts about how the cross-browser support would have played out if delivered in Q2 as planned. Even though the standard UI of an out-of-the-box Dynamics CRM implementation can surely be transformed into a standards compliant version if given enough resources, it’s a very tricky situation when it comes to customizations and extensions created by the CRM ecosystem. VAR’s, ISV’s, sysadmins, basically anyone with access and know-how on tweaking Dynamics CRM to do what is required of it have been doing just that for several years now. As a result, there’s a huge amount of unsupported scripts out there that simply would not work in the brave new cross-browser world.

Sometime ago (2 weeks ago, actually), the CRM team released a Custom Code Validation Tool that was designed to help these same people to resolve breaking script issues when upgrading to the next release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. That’s certainly a great help in proceeding with the task at hand, but unfortunately it was a bit too late when compared to the original target schedule of “CRM Anywhere”. If you run the tool on even the official CRM Demo Builder environment created by Microsoft, it won’t pass without “red” and “blue” errors either. In short, there are not very many environments out there right now that are capable of demonstrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM on an Apple OS X machine running Safari, at least with any impressive customizations and integrations to external data sources.

Would you have felt comfortable with releasing an update into the wild that would have wreaked havoc in many customer and demo environments? Would that have really conveyed the proper image of “CRM Anywhere” to the potential and existing customers? Most likely it would have not. There are times when you need to be able to announce breaking changes (like with current Windows Phone 7 devices not being able to run Windows Phone 8 apps due to a shared Win8 core architecture, as we’ve recently discovered), but probably this was not one of those times really. Ultimately, I think the decision that Dennis Michalis and his team has made must be the right one, as they certainly would not have made it lightheartedly. The business benefits of a CRM system must triumph the technological benefit of cross-browser support and the customers would presumably agree. Could the announcement have become sooner? Definitely it should have, but it didn’t, and that’s what we now need to adjust to now.

Still, one may ask how did we end up in this situations? It’s a design decision Microsoft has made back in the days (as I’ve blogged about earlier) and now they’re paying the price for it. So, that’s how it is and that’s just life. You could find some resemblance to the situation from Dynamics CRM ISV’s and VAR’s investing their efforts on developing Silverlight add-ons and then finding out last fall that Windows 8 Metro browser would not be supporting any plugins (including Silverlight, but excluding Adobe Flash). Life, as we know, goes on nonetheless as the ecosystem will find ways to route around the problems, much like the Internet as a fault-tolerant system was originally designed to do.

What’s up with the mobile support delay then? After all, CWR Mobility has built clients for iPhone, Android iPad etc. and has been selling them throughout the whole 1H/2012. In fact, since the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile product delivered and supported by Microsoft was only going to cover CRM Online customers, not on-premises or hosted environments, it’s perfectly justified to present the question “what do you mean it’s delayed until Q4”? What exactly did the mobile client announced in Q2 2012 Release Preview guide contain from a functional perspective that customers couldn’t already acquire directly from CWR Mobility? If you ask me, this is more about adjusting the commercial story of “CRM Anywhere” rather than physical limitations, but we can of course hope that the Q4 2102 launch will bring us significant functional improvements as well as a more coherent process for customers wishing to deploy the mobile clients.

How about the rest of the mobile/social/local/etc. CRM market in general, will that just run over Dynamics CRM now as a result of this? I personally don’t think so. If you look at some of the competing CRM products out there, we’ve seen Salesforce.com announce their Touch client for mobile and tablet devices already last September, but it remains in beta as of now. After all, it’s quite easy to create great looking concepts of the way the social business of the future should operate, but very rarely is there a chance to start from a pure, clean slate. If you have no legacy processes and apps to worry about, you probably have no valuable, long lasting customer relationships either, which sort of undermines the whole effort.

Let’s remember another important aspect here: Windows Reimagined a.k.a Windows 8 is one of the biggest gambles Microsoft has ever made and it’s due out in Q4 2012 (unconfirmed, as usual, but you get the drift). If the next Dynamics CRM Service Update is scheduled to be released in the same timeframe, then do you think that there would be any chance of receiving an actual Metro client for CRM at the same time? We can always hope of course, and the Worldwide Partner Conference 2012 to be held next week could well shed some light on this topic, one way or another. Personally I think it’s a bit of a long shot still to make it into the same time frame as Windows 8, but even a preview/beta would be way cool. I guess we’ll learn about that soon enough as WPC 12 kicks off.

Finally, if cross-browser support has now been delayed to Q4 2012, then I think there’s one favor that we can ask from the Dynamics CRM product team: could you please enable also the customization part of the UI to be cross-browser by the time Q4 2012 Service Update rolls out? It’s not that I have anything against Internet Explorer as such, but I think the #MSDYNCRM community deserves a tiny little upside in all this, don’t you think?

July 7, 2012
CRM adventures in Azure: SQL Server 2012 updates

After Microsoft announced their latest enhancements to the Windows Azure service catalog in the beginning of June (although still in a preview phase), I wanted to test the Azure Virtual Machines for running a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 server instance in the Microsoft hosted cloud. Since we now have an excellent step-by-step tutorial available from Shan McArthur / AdxStudio, it was a breeze to get going with the installation process. You should also check out the Gold Coast blog by @devkeydet for some really helpful articles, such as Building a CRM 2011 dev box using a Windows Azure Virtual Machine. With high quality community content like this available, who wouldn’t want to build a CRM server in Azure?

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to write some of my own experiences on working with Windows Azure in the future, but the first issue I ran into is actually more related to SQL Server in general.

Side-by-side was not on my side

In addition to Azure, I also wanted to utilize the latest SQL Server 2012 version to investigate what new reporting capaibilities it might offer compared to the trusted old SQL 2008 R2. The SQL 2012 installation went through without any errors but after I tried to launch the CRM installation I discovered that Reporting Services was not running. In the application log I had the following errors:

Service cannot be started. System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘ReportingServicesNativeServer, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91’ or one of its dependencies. The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800736B1)
File name: ‘ReportingServicesNativeServer, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91’ —> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x800736B1): The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800736B1)
at Microsoft.ReportingServices.Library.ServiceAppDomainController..ctor()
at Microsoft.ReportingServices.Library.ReportService.OnStart(String[] args)
at System.ServiceProcess.ServiceBase.ServiceQueuedM…

Activation context generation failed for “F:\SQL\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS11.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportServer\bin\ReportingServicesNativeServer.dll”.Error in manifest or policy file “C:\Windows\WinSxS\manifests\amd64_microsoft.vc80.atl_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.4053_none_8a1a02152edb659b.manifest” on line 0. Invalid Xml syntax.

After a bit of googling I landed on a blog post on SQL Server VC++ Installation voes, which seemed to describe the exact same issue I was facing. I tested the sxstrace tool and the System File Checker (SFC) referenced in the post, reproducing the same results as the author was getting. It turned out that this side-by-side (SXS) error was caused by a manifest file that was empty. A similar discussion was also found in the Windows Azure Virtual Machines for SQL Server MSDN forum, so figured I must be on to something.

Just before I was about to start modifying the manifest file properties and copy pasting the content there, I noticed that there was one detail which stopped me from proceeding: both of the posts were referencing an x86 processor architecture file (x86_microsoft.vc80.atl_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.4053_none_d1c738ec43578ea1.manifest), whereas my error was related to the amd64 version (amd64_microsoft.vc80.atl_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.4053_none_8a1a02152edb659b.manifest). So, I needed to hunt down the correct manifest file content for the 64-bit version with the proper hash value, but unfortunately this was where my googling came up short.

After being a bit more creative with my search terms, I discovered the Microsoft knowledge base article 2688946: FIX: Error message when you install SQL Server 2012: “The identities of the manifests are identical but their contents are different”. The article also said that the fix for this issue was released in Cumulative Update 1 for SQL Server 2012. So, off to KB 2679368 then to request a download link for the CU1 file. Looks like MS doesn’t want just anyone installing these, so they make you fill in a form with your email address + captcha in order to get the file, but luckily that’s all there was to the process.

I was a bit puzzled by the fact that the CU1 installer said “This installation provides updates for the Community Technology Preview (August CTP)“, but apparently it’s fully valid for the RTM version, too. I guess the components in SQL tend to be less strict about versions, since the SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Configuration Tool still has “SQL Server 2008” in the process description… Anyway, after applying CU1 I was able to start the Reporting Services service and proceed with the CRM installation. Success!

The lesson: there’s always an update hiding somewhere

When building your development or demo environment, it’s important to be aware of the fact that what you get from the MSDN subscriber downloads site is mostly RTM bits. Especially when going for SQL Sever 2012 as the database for Dynamics CRM 2011, you should not use these files at all, because the installation won’t work. Just grab the product key from MSDN, but go to Microsoft Download Center here (direct download link to CRM 2011 Server) to get the new version that includes Update Rollup 6. Otherwise you won’t be able to configure the Reporting Extensions and will get the error “Unable to validate SQL Server Reporting Services Report Server installation. Please check that it is correctly installed on the local machine.” See this thread on the CRM Forum for some more info.

Shortly after completing the CRM installation I discovered that there is in fact already a Cumulative Update 2 for SQL Server 2012, too. Wow, things move fast nowadays! Didn’t SQL 2012 get released just recently? Well, it turns out that actually the first cumulative update to SQL Server 2012 was released only 9 days after the general availability (GA) of SQL 2012. Let’s have a look at the Incremental Servicing Model of SQL Server in a bit more detail to understand what’s going on.

It looks like also the SQL Server team have adopted a fairly agile release policy that mirrors the Dynamics CRM release roadmap concepts to some extent. What they call a Cumulative Update (CU) seems to correspond to the Update Rollup (UR) in the Dynamics CRM lingo, meaning they are both collections of hotfixes, released on a bi-monthly target schedule. However, unlike CRM Update Rollups that are nowadays delivered through Windows Update / Microsoft Update, the SQL CU’s won’t be delivered through this mechanism, because those updates need to fall into the General Distribution Release (GDR) category as defined by Microsoft (you didn’t think it was going to be that simple, now did you?). So, that’s why after installing SQL 2012 + CRM 2011 on a new Windows server you’ll automatically get Update Rollup 8 for CRM, but no updates for SQL. If you need the latest hotfixes, you should acquired the Cumulative Update package through the KB pages.

Finally, yes, there will also be a Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012 released eventually, as many people will refrain from deploying a production database on a new version until this traditional MS software milestone has been reached. Whether the SP1 for SQL 2012 will be a similar release as the Q2 2012 Service Update for Dynamics CRM (to be released sometime in Q3) I’m not so sure, since in the world of CRM these Service Updates contain significant new functionality in addition to the previously released hotfixes. The latest information on SQL updates can be found from the SQL Release Serivces Blog. Note that there are no Service Packs available for Dynamics CRM, so the terminology used in describing the release policies will likely remain different from other Microsoft products like SQL or Windows. For a more detailed description of the CRM update terminology and delivery mechanisms, please see my previous post on the topic.

July 2, 2012