Update Rollup 6 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

The Update Rollup 6 for CRM 2011 has been released from Microsoft. The initial release was done about 10 days ago, but due to some issues they were pulled. The exact reasons are unclear, and since the update rollup cannot be removed, I hope you did not install the erroneous version the day it came out! But in case you did, the new Update could be installed on top of the old Rollup 6.

The new release so far seems good - no issues during the update and as far as I noticed, no issues after the update! The link for downloading the update is as follows:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28712

Goal Management in CRM 2011 for a custom entity

Goal Management is a completely unique stand alone feature in the new revamped crm 2011. It provides an organization multiple touchstones to monitor the progress of an activity. You can provide roll ups of individual goals to provide progress reports on a department.

In this post I will walk through goal management setup for a custom entity. The custom entity is a stripped down version of the orders OOB entity, with multiple status options.

CRM 2011 import error: managed solution cannot overwrite the EntityMap component

Solutions are a very important feature in crm 2011, with a multitude of uses. One of the most common ways to utilize solutions is to create packaged customizations that can be later distributed. The publisher that is associated with the solution can set the managed properties to control the level of customizable actions the end user can have. For example, you can get to a very granular level of checking if a particular view is end user customizable, or not.

Solutions are "layered" when they are imported, based on the order of import. In this post, I will focus on a particular error during an import of a managed solution.

If the import is done using the UI or with code (like a console or form application), the error will be similar to this message:

A managed solution cannot overwrite the EntityMap component with Id=b925c093-77c6-474e-b7ac
-dae44d569c53 which has an unmanaged base instance.  The most likely scenario for this error is that an unmanaged solution has installed a new unmanaged EntityMap component on the 
target system, and now a managed solution from the same publisher is trying to install 
that same EntityMap component as managed.  This will cause an invalid layering 
of solutions on the target system and is not allowed.