Dynamics CRM 2013 SP1 - Enterprise Case Management features for On-Premise

My earlier posts on Service Management Spring release were on the online version of Dynamics CRM, as at the time of the first post Service Pack 1 was not available for on-premise installs. Since then, Service Pack 1 has been released for public consumption, and I was very excited to install the same on my own VirtualBox VM. After the SP1 install and the server reboot, I was all set to continue messing around with the Service management features, except that I could not find the darn "Service Management" section under settings. Follow along as I will explain how make the new section available for use!

In Place Upgrade - CRM 2011 to CRM 2013

Now that the latest and greatest version of Dynamics CRM has been released, I was ready to get hands on with the new features. Since I had my own VM (details on building a VirtualBox VM here) to mess around with, I planned on doing an in place upgrade. Please note that this is not the recommended approach especially in production environments. A new install of CRM 2013 or a migration upgrade would be the best options for stage/ prod setups.

Here are the steps to follow for an in place upgrade from CRM 2011 to CRM 2013.

Building a CRM 2011 Virtual Machine on Windows 7 using VirtualBox

For folks like me who keep messing around with crm 2011 and its features, it makes a lot of sense to have a dedicated sandbox environment. My goal was to create a virtual machine on my Win 7 laptop, with the following requirements:
1. Able to guest host a x64 OS (Windows 2008)
2. Ability to take snapshots of my VM
3. And of course, ease of use and compatability.