Tag: update rollup

When will my cloud get updated? CRM Online and Update Rollup status

The benefits of running your Dynamics CRM application in Microsoft’s cloud is that you don’t have to worry about installing update rollups to your server, since MS takes care of all that maintenance. The downside is that you can’t be sure when exactly the updates take place. As we’re coming closer to the expected release date of Dynamics CRM R8, it’s a good time to reflect on the past update schedules of CRM Online.

As of mid-June, CRM Online organizations are still running only the Update Rollup 5 version (at least on the EMEA CRM4 data center), while on-premises environments may already be running Update Rollup 8. No matter if you use an existing environment or sign up for a new trial organization, the version you get is 5.0.9688.1561. This corresponds to roughly the build number of on-premises UR5, which is 5.0.9688.1533, whereas Update Rollup 6 is 5.0.9690.1992 already. How can you check the version of your CRM Online application? Simple: on the browser client just click File – Help – About Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You’ll see version from the top of the pop-up screen.

So, where do I go to translate those ten digits into a human readable version name? For the list of detailed build numbers, related KB articles and other information, be sure to bookmark this page on the Dynamics CRM In The Field blog: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and 2011 Update Rollup Release Dates, Build Numbers, and Collateral. That page is being updated as new rollups are released and it also has in the past contained projected release dates of upcoming updates as well. Has, since at the time of writing it no longer does. Also note that the CRM Online build numbers and release schedules can and will differ from on-premises, as we’ve already seen.

Back when Update Rollup 7 was released on March 22nd, the accompanying post on the CRM Team blog promised the CRM Online Datacenter update schedule to “Mid to Late April, 2012”. This was also the information on the related article KB 2600643, but things have changed since then, as now all the post UR5 KB articles read:

For online customers Infrastructure improvements are being made to CRM Online. Because of this, update rollups will not be applied to servers until the improvements are complete. Through the System Notifications page for the system maintenance window, you will be notified of when your organization will be updated to the new infrastructure. The latest updates will be applied at that time.

It’s no secret that Microsoft is working on bringing the Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365 clouds onto a single platform and unifying many of the surrounding components, such as subscription management or user authentication. This has apparently caused the planned schedules of Update Rollups to CRM Online get changed from those earlier communicated. When UR5, also known as the Q4 2011 Service Update, was released, it was deployed first to CRM Online environments before becoming available for on-premises and hosted environments. Since then we’ve seen UR6, UR7 and UR8 all get released to the on-premises environments first, with CRM Online remaining in the “UR5+” status for quite some time. Note that the builds are not exactly the same and there are likely to be differences in what the terminology means for different platforms. For example, UR6 brought support for SQL Server 2012, but we’ve already heard Microsoft say that CRM Online was running on SQL 2012 long before that.

What the current status of updates to the Microsoft hosted cloud means that CRM Online customers are not yet able to leverage enhancements brought in UR6-8, such as the read-optimized forms introduced in Update Rollup 7. Also any server side bugfixes and functional changes beyond UR5 must be assumed to be lacking from CRM Online organizations, although we can’t know for sure what may have been applied as hotfixes. For example, problems with connections not merging when deactivating duplicate records was fixed in UR7.

On the client side things are a bit different, since all the Update Rollups are rolling onto CRM Outlook clients through Microsoft Update. There is no longer a separate client version for Online and on-premises, so everybody gets the same hotfixes. Even though Microsoft recommends that the client and server Update Rollup versions should be kept close to one another, they don’t need to be identical. Here’s what it says on the CRM In The Field blog:

The general rule of thumb is to try to keep the versions in sync as much as possible. However, it is permissible (though not recommended as a long-term solution) to run mismatched Update Rollup versions on Outlook client and server, as Microsoft does do some testing of such combinations.

So, since the CRM Online version difference is obviously well known by MS, the UR combinations shouldn’t be an issue for Outlook users who’ve deployed the latest Microsoft Update packages. Even if you’re using the offline database in your CRM Outlook client, I assume compatibility between the CRM Online database has been taken into consideration. Of course in the field of IT, you should never assume anything, rather you should test any Update Rollups in a dedicated test environment, but smaller CRM customers may not always have that luxury. Which gets us to the following rule of thumb: don’t ever be the first one deploy the latest Update Rollup once it’s released. Wait a few weeks and check out the CRM forums and blog posts to read about the experiences other users have with the latest update, only then decide to deploy the update onto production devices (first onto your own test servers and clients, if you have them available). The Dynamics CRM community tends to be quite effective in reporting new issues that arise with UR’s, so leverage the wisdom of the crowd and save yourself from some unpleasant surprises.

The big question that many people are searching for an answer to is: when exactly will Dynamics CRM R8 / Update Rollup 9 / Q2 2012 Service Update be released? (In case that previous terminology trio made no sense to you, be sure to read my explanation of the “Dynamics CRM update & version madness”.) I wish we knew, but in reality only Microsoft has that information and it hasn’t been publicly communicated. We’ve got less than two weeks to go on the Q2 of 2012, which makes it a tight schedule to keep if also Online organizations would need to be updated in addition to releasing the on-premises bits. We need to remember that R8 is a very significant update due to the added cross browser support, which will surely keep many CRM developers busy with fixing legacy scripts, so any issues that the R8 beta program may have revealed certainly need to be thoroughly investigated and I’m glad if Microsoft is taking extra time to get the whole CRM Anywhere experience right with UR9.

Status update 2012-06-20: As reported on XRM Services blog, the US data center CRM Online organizations were updated to 5.0.9690.2174 on June 19th, which translates to Update Rollup 7+ but still a bit below the Update Rollup 8 available for on-premises environments. A similar update has been scheduled to take place on EMEA data centers one week later, on June 26th. Since it’s quite unlikely that there would be several maintenance breaks on consecutive weeks, this appears to indicate that at least for CRM Online customers the long awaited R8 release, also known as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 Service Update, appears to be delayed from the original schedule and now seems to become “Q3 2012 Service Update”. It is of course still possible that the on-premises bits for Update Rollup 9 will be released before the end of June.

Status update 2012-07-04: It’s Q3 now and we know for sure that the release of R8 has been delayed from Q2 2012. The service break for CRM Online on June 26th in EMEA didn’t actually bring any updates to the CRM application, but now there’s another maintenance break scheduled for July 11th. Since the US data center went from UR5+ to UR7+ in the previous round, this may just be EMEA catching up on the delayed Update Rollups. I’ll update the post again as we see the results or hear announcements from Microsoft so watch this space.

Status update 2012-07-07: Finally we have a release date of July 19th for CRM Online. However, the “CRM Anywhere” functionality has been dropped from the update and will not arrive until six months later in Q4 2012. Read my analysis on the announcements from this blog post.

June 17, 2012
Dynamics CRM update & version madness explained
Things used to be simple back in 2005 when I started working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (known as only Microsoft CRM back then). You pretty much knew that there would be a version update every 2-3 years. In between, there would be a number of hotfixes created to address software bugs, which were packaged as “Update Rollups”. CRM 3.0 received in total three such packages. CRM 4.0 things kicked up a notch as we started getting these Update Rollups (UR) based on a regular schedule, one update every 2 months (until they were put on hold after UR21). CRM 2011 adopted the same UR release schedule, but in addition to that, Microsoft announced that they would adopt a new agile release model.

Exactly one year after the announcement we find ourselves in situation that may seem quite confusing to the casual observer. There are new releases in the horizon on a continuous basis and it’s easy to lose track of what exactly is meant by which update. Well, here’s my shot at explaining what’s going on.

What’s the “R” in R8?

R8 means Release 8. OK, so what are the previous seven versions then? They don’t refer to CRM 1.0, 1.2, 3.0, 4.0 or 2011 (there never was a 2.0, as some of you will remember). This R-based naming policy comes from the CRM Online product, which used to have its own release schedule with no UR’s and a slightly different code base from the on-premises product. The first R was presumably released when CRM Online was announced in April 2008. Things changed when Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 was released on January 15th, 2011, after which both the Online and on-premises version have pretty much gone hand in hand.

The “Rx” naming signifies a new functionality release and should never be used to refer to Update Rollup versions. Don’t shorten UR8 to R8, because the two are not the same (even though they are intertwined as we’ll later see). The Update Rollup version numbers always start from 1, so there’s been an Update Rollup 1 for both Dynamics CRM 2011, CRM 4.0 as well as CRM 3.0. Makes googling for information all the more merrier, eh? The Rx releases are a product of the cloud era and until we reach the next era beyond cloud apps, I don’t expect Microsoft to start the numbers from R1 all over again.

What’s the Q2 2012 Service Update?

Since it would have been confusing for on-prem customers to first release Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, then follow it up with a “Release 7” all of a sudden, Microsoft decided to come up with a different naming policy for these new, agile releases. Unfortunately, the naming policy they chose gave us monsters like “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Q4 2011 Service Update”. Wow, how catchy, and only 50 characters long! As a result of this, what was originally supposed to be just internal jargon became the preferred option for human communication and we learned to know the update as R7. 50 vs. 2 chars, which one would you expect to fly in the age of Twitter? ‘Nuff said.

Most of you must surely be already familiar with the contents of R8, the next release, and if you’re not, here’s a link to the Release Preview Guide. The real catch is in how the promised new features will actually be delivered. The correct answers to this question are:
- In multiple Update Rollup versions
- As solution files
- Through Microsoft hosted, subscription based services or 3rd party licensing
- In other Microsoft products
A, B, C, D – tick ’em all. This is the reason why there will not be any single place where you can “download R8”.

What will the Update Rollup 9 contain?

The official release announcement of Q2 2012 Service Update will most likely coincide with Update Rollup 9. However, if you study the contents of the Guide, you’ll find features that have already been released before UR9. Rapid View Forms were introduced in March as part of UR7 and re-labelled as Read-Optimized Forms. The same is true for SQL Server 2012 compatibility.

As we know from the previous R7 release, Activity Feeds are delivered as a solution package that you will need to download from the Dynamics Marketplace and configure manually. The Activity Feeds solution is not a part of the “core” Dynamics CRM product. However, there are parts of it that have been built into the platform, which is why at least Update Rollup 5 is required in order to install the solution. Similarly, you will need to get an updated version of the Activity Feeds solution after installing Update Rollup 9, otherwise you won’t see the new features.

A key deliverable of Update Rollup 9 will be the cross-browser compatibility that makes Dynamics CRM available on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Since this is such a significant change to the platform, Microsoft has been kind enough to grant access to the R8 beta release for anyone who’s willing to follow these steps. Please note that the beta bits available for download cannot be upgraded to the final release of R8, so use them in a test environment only.

Extended browser support is completely separate from the mobile device support promised in R8. While you will be able to run CRM on an iPad Safari browser, the mobile UI demoed by Microsoft in numerous occasions is only available as 1) a subscription service from Microsoft, if you’re running Online or IFD, or 2) a perpetual license to be purchased from CWR Mobility if you intend to host the required service on your own server. Trying to access your Dynamics CRM environment after UR9 installation with an iPhone will most likely just give you the simplified Mobile Express user interface already familiar from the CRM 4.0 days.

Oh, and do note that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile released for Windows Phone 7 back in Q4 2011 Service Update is a completely separate product, even though it carries exactly the same name as the new offering developed by CWR Mobility and later on re-labelled by Microsoft. Since CWR Mobility didn’t have a Windows Phone client, this mobile app will likely remain on a separate development roadmap from the CWR-based offering.

What’s the role of SQL Server 2012 in all this?

If you haven’t seen the cool drag & drop report designer or the animated bubble chart demo of Power View, take a look at this video:

Wow, wouldn’t that look nice on a Dynamics CRM dashboard! Well, even though Power View is listed as one of the R8 features, there’s a couple things you should know:
- It’s not available in the cloud. Sorry, CRM Online users. Maybe in R9 then?
- CRM dashboards are a different data visualization technique that will remain “as is” for R8, not integrated with Power View.
The pre-configured Power View templates promised in R8 will be delivered as a Dynamics Labs solution, probably as a download from the Dynamics Marketplace. The same goes for the PowerPivot models to be included. Note that if you want to publish these PowerPivots to your organization, you’ll need an on-premises SharePoint Server 2010 with Enterprise CAL’s to view their contents on a browser window in your intranet.

In addition, if you plan to use SQL Server 2012 for hosting your Dynamics CRM database and Reporting Services, it’s good to know that you can’t achieve this configuration with the RTM bits for Dynamics CRM 2011. Update Rollup 6 has established a new baseline for CRM and you’ll need to download the server installation files from Microsoft Download Center, otherwise you’ll run into the following error while trying to install the Reporting Extensions:

Unable to validate SQL Server Reporting Services Report Server installation. Please check that it is correctly installed on the local machine.

What time is Metro?

Putting things into perspective, Dynamics CRM is a small fish in the tank compared to the big whale that is Windows 8. Since R8 will be out well before Windows 8, there isn’t yet a 100% support provided for the Internet Explorer 10 browser provided with it. Hopefully the remaining issues will be addressed by upcoming UR’s as Windows 8 is nevertheless just around the corner. Presumably we’ll see a proper Metro app for Dynamics CRM once R9 is released later this year. After all, the Windows RT tablets will not be able to run Outlook and we’ll need some solution for activity tracking to and from CRM.

When it comes to Windows Server 8, official support has not been announced. However, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t install Dynamics CRM 2011 Server on a Windows 8. Daniel Cai has done just that and offers a tutorial for anyone wanting to test R8 on the very latest Microsoft products available.
May 11, 2012
Activity Feeds are here, so “What’s New” in CRM then?

It’s been nine months since Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 was released. Given the large number of new features and functionality included in the new version, I’m sure many organizations have been able to keep themselves busy with thinking about how to leverage all of them. Anyway, the time is now upon us when we see the first true deliverable from the new agile development path that the Dynamics CRM product development team has adopted. The “Q4 2011 Service Update”, “November Service Update” or “CRM Online R7”, however you like to call it, gives a taste of things to come, as new features and improvements are now introduced bi-annually instead of a big bang release every 2-3 years.

There’s lots of neat things included in the update, such as multi-category charts, user access auditing, lookup and date fields for dialogs, ignoring null values and inactive records in duplicate detection rules etc. Have no doubt, though, this release will be remembered from the Activity Feeds, so let’s proceed straight to them.

More than just an accelerator for CRM

Microsoft has split the delivery method of the Activity Feeds functionality into two tiers. The platform level changes are delivered with Update Rollup 4, which brings us a selection of new default entities, such as the feed Post. These will provide the building blocks not only for the visible Activity Feeds released now but also web services API enhancements, which are covered in the 5.0.7 update of the SDK.

The Update Rollups can nowadays be considered pretty much as “business as usual” hotfixes like the ones released for other Microsoft products, both on server and client side, as they are delivered through the common Microsoft Update mechanism. Testing and planning for the Rollups is of course very much recommended still, as significant changes can be included in them, and yes, they do occasionally break compatibility between versions. Furthermore, the Update Rollup 5 required for Activity Feeds to function cannot be uninstalled if things go wrong.

Anyway, unlike the hotfixes that can be expected to be installed on almost all CRM environments, the Activity Feeds user interface components will probably remain missing from many instances. Why? Because there is no automatic delivery method for them, unless you are using a CRM Online environment that has been provisioned after the R7 release became available. You see, Activity Feeds still are kind of like an accelerator package, as the solution file will need to be downloaded from the Dynamics Marketplace and installed by the system administrator.

Not even installing the solution file and publishing the customizations is enough – you still need to configure them. The menu item for “What’s New” will appear in the UI after the solution installation, but none of the entities in your CRM have yet been enabled for Activity Feed posts. To do this, you’ll need to navigate to Settings and go to Activity Feeds Configuration menu. Create a new Post Configuration record for each entity that you wish to relate posts to. The configuration UI of the solution is not too nice, as you’ll actually need to use the logical name of the entity rather than the display name. So, to enable the new functionality for the user entity (which is the very first thing you must do!) is enter the value “systemuser” and click save. Make sure you check the box for “enable walls for this type of record form” and don’t forget to publish the entity’s customizations after clicking on save.

What’s a “wall”? If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t), you’ll know this refers to the place where the posts related to a user will be displayed in a descending chronological order. Now, in CRM it’s not only users that can have walls, but any entity for which you have created a Post Configuration entry for. Even your custom entities, like “project” or “event” can be set to have their own Wall. However, bare in mind that not all the system entities are supported for the Activity Feeds functionality, so you can’t have a discussion related to, say, competitor or product records (which kind of sucks, as those are some very common topics for employee discussion around the water cooler, but guess you’ll still need to get away from your desk every now & then). For a complete list of supported system entities, see this page on the SDK.

As you can see from the image above, the wall is actually a web part that is presented on a new tab, that is located before the first default tab (general). The tab will be collapsed by default and the form actually scrolls to the general tab right after the form script is loaded, so a user may not notice anything new on the form. However, if you click on the anchor on the left side navigation, the Record Wall will be revealed in all its glory. Here the user will have the option of adding the record into his list of followed CRM records, see who else is following it, and of course post an update on the wall. (By the way: if you have multiple forms per entity, you’ll need to add the Record Wall web parts manually, by following these instructions.)

There’s also a Personal Wall that shows the user all the content from followed records, and that’s the first entry visible on the updated sitemap for Workplace. What’s really nice is that you have a link right after the “What’s New” header, which will allow you to pop up the wall in a new window. This way you can have the feed view quickly available for you at any time, no matter with which CRM entities you are currently working on in the main application window.

Furthermore, every user has a User Record Wall, which would be identical to the concept of a Facebook profile page. Sorry, no timeline design available here yet!

Not just for mindless chatter: business logic for Auto Posts

If all that Activity Feeds provided was the ability to chat with your colleagues or manually post updates related to records, then it would have a tough time competing with established enterprise microblogging apps like Yammer. Luckily the Dynamics CRM platform can offer much more than that. By allowing certain events related to CRM records to generate content for the Activity Feeds the system can actually serve as a tool that removes the need for you to email information about business events or type updates into a microblogging app. A traditional way to demonstrate the CRM workflows has been to create email alerts on closed opportunities, but now you can reduce the clutter in your inbox by moving these into the right context (opportunity form) with the ability for users to comment and see others’ comments. (more…)

October 26, 2011
Update Rollup 27 has been… Seriously, guys!

Got a Dynamics CRM blog? Like to tweet about all things Microsoft Dynamics? You’re in luck, because Microsoft is providing you a steady supply of topics in the form of CRM Update Rollups (or UR’s if you prefer acronyms). Right now Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is on level 13 and will certainly continue to receive plenty more until the end of its support lifecycle. In January 2009 Microsoft stated that they aim to release a new update rollup every 8 weeks. If you multiply 13 x 8, that gives you 104 (two years), which means the actual release schedule is even tighter.

When a UR comes out, you’ll be certainly well informed about it through the Dynamics CRM community, as this tends to generate a massive number of blog posts, tweets and retweets in celebration of the event. Having new hotfixes is of course important for anyone working with CRM, but has the whole UR phenomena gotten a little bit out of hand by now? The recent tweet by Jerry Weinstock from CRM Innovation highlights the issue perfectly:

Let’s make one thing clear: there is no newsworthy content in just posting that “Update Rollup X has been released”. Nada. It’s like stating that a new copy of Wired is now available at the news stands.

I’ve seen a countless number of practically abandoned Dynamics CRM blogs where the author no longer has the time or energy to produce original content. Yet they see it as their duty to keep posting UR notifications one after another. Wow, writing a blog has never been so easy! Ok, so you guys may have way more posts than I do, but do you really think you’re contributing to the CRM community in a meaningful way?

I’m not saying that UR’s cannot be meaningful topics for a post, but you absolutely must provide some editorial content of your own, in addition to the KB article cut&paste. Tell about your experiences with the update, what was the reason why a particular hotfix was significant for you, what possible problems the UR installation may cause etc. Say something that not every one of us CRM geeks out there wouldn’t already know through their RSS feeds and Twitter lists.

The amount of great information you can acquire just by following a Twitter hashtag like #MSDYNCRM is truly incredible and I don’t want to play down the value of an active Dynamics CRM community in any way. Quite the contrary, that’s the one thing we should all celebrate. All I’m asking is that the next time you see the news about a new UR, think for a moment how likely it is that all your followers and readers have already received the news through their own channels. And if you RT, at least put a funny twist on it!

As for the UR release process in general, I propose that Microsoft registers the @UpdateRollup account on Twitter and we can all just start following it. Or better yet, replace the old Announcements section inside Dynamics CRM with a dashboard of all the official MS Dynamics CRM tweets in one convenient place. Of course in CRM 2011 we’ll already be able to configure those dashboards ourselves.

September 24, 2010