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.

CRM 2011 Point of View - What is the scope of a deactivated View?

Views are a great way to provide the user with data filtered on a very specific criteria that is easily accessible. The view can be a system level view, which means that all users with the right security role can see the view, or the view can be a personal view, visible only to the user (which can then be shared).

In this post, I want to talk a little bit about the system views and what it means to have a view in the deactivated state.

Proxy web service to connect to Dynamics CRM

While Dynamics CRM 2011 webservice endpoints are available for theoretically any client, there seems to be a few challenges while it comes to a Java implementation especially using NTLM/ Kerberos authentication. One easy workaround is to create a custom webservice that can then be hosted in IIS which will act as a prxy between the java client and Dynamics CRM. In this post, I will walk through the creation of one such simple webservice which will create a case in CRM.

Manually Uninstall Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server

I recently had a very weird experience installing Dynamics CRM 2011 server front end role. The front end server would start the install process and make the connection to the sql server. Midway through the install the sql connection was getting terminated, resulting in the following error:

Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Common.Update.DBUpdateAction failed.
A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The semaphore timeout period has expired.)

Bulk import and delete of Subject data - A most excellent adventure

The Subject lookup is very unique in Dynamics CRM due to the fact that it is the only lookup that is formatted in an hierarchical tree structure. The typical use, at least in the out of the box arena, is around incidents and knowledge base articles. Recently I was working with a customer who wanted to leverage the Subject lookup, and had a whole bunch of Subjects (both active and inactive) that needed to be imported. Here are a few things I learnt along the way which might prove useful to you!

CRM 2011 SSRS Drill down reports

While the CRM 2011 OOB report wizard will suffice in many cases, there are specific reasons to go the custom SSRS route. In this post, I will talk you through the creation of a drill down report using a summary table.

Requirement:
Create a summary table of the number of incidents categorized by Subject. The incident count should list the incidents, and the user should be able to open the individual incident by clicking on the ticket number

Adding a sever to an existing CRM 2011 intallation

Recently I had a harrowing experience trying to add a front end server to existing install. The existing CRM 2011 setup had UR 12 rollup update applied on the Front End, Back End and SSRS Server. When trying to install the front end role on a new server, I kept getting the following error in the Installation Wizard: "The Product key is not compatible with installed version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM".