CRM 2011: Changing SQL Port

By default the CRM installation wizard uses the default SQL port i.e. 1433. I don't believe you are able to specify a different port as part of the initial installation, so you'll need to ensure this port is left open for this step. Once CRM is installed you can modify the SQL port that it uses.

To do so you can follow the steps described in this post which describes the steps required to do so for a CRM 4.0 installation. The steps are only marginally different for CRM 2011.

The difference lies in the modifications required to be made to the MSCRM key in the registry. You only need to modify the configdb string. The others (database, metabase) are no longer relevant for CRM 2011.

I'd recommend the following steps in terms of implementing the above change to isolate the port change in case of issues:

1. Open port 1433
2. Install CRM and confirm installation
3. Make port changes above in the CRM installation
4. Make sure the new port is opened
5. Restart IIS on the CRM server and restart the SQL service on the database server
6. Refresh CRM to ensure it is still running. If not, you did something wrong.
7. Block port 1433
8. Refresh CRM to ensure it is still running. 

CRM 2011 Installation Requirements

This question gets posed to me every so often. In light of that, the following post will provide information describing the installation requirements for CRM 2011. I will also highlight what I consider to be practical best practice recommendations and finally at the end I have provided server breakdown installation scenarios.

First of all, please refer to the very useful link below. It contains a step by step visual walk through of all the installation components, including SQL, CRM prerequisites, CRM 2011, Email Router etc. The rest of this post makes abundant reference to this walk through.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3176.how-to-install-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011.aspx

The following link similarly provides a visual walk through for installing and configuring the Microsoft Dynamics CRM E-mail Router (Online & Exchange Online).

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4686.microsoft-dynamics-crm-e-mail-router-configuration-crm-2011-online-exchange-online.aspx

Finally, bookmark this link. It contains a very useful set of Q&A for commonly asked questions related to CRM 2011 server setup.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crminthefield/archive/2012/02/11/crm-2011-server-setup-commonly-asked-questions.aspx

Hardware and Software Requirements

• See sections "Hardware Requirements" and "Software Requirements" 

Credentials

• Installation User - see section "Required for installation of Dynamics CRM 2011" for permissions required for this user. 
• Recommendation: Create a user called "CRMAdmin" under which you will install CRM
• Services - CRM creates a number of windows services
• Recommendation: It is recommended to have a separate to have a separate account for each of these. For example: 
• Sandboxing service – e.g. create account CRMSandbox (see section “Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sandbox Processing Service” for permissions required for this user)
• Async service – e.g. create account CRMAsyncProcess (see section “Microsoft Dynamics CRM Asynchronous Processing” for permissions required for this user)
• Web Deployment service e.g. – create account CRMDeploymentWS  (see section “Web Deployment Service (CRMDeploymentServiceAppPool Application Pool identity)” for permissions required for this user)
• Application service – e.g. create account CRMAppService (see section “Application Service (IIS Application Pool identity CRMAppPool)” for permissions required for this user)

Ports

See section "Ports" for a full description of default ports that are used as part of the CRM solution. You can also refer to the following post for a visual representation and link to a white paper covering the topic.

Installation Summary

The reference provides a walk through of each of these procedures:

• SQL Server 2008 R2 – Scroll to section “Installing SQL 2008 R2” for a step by step guide. I’d follow these instructions although I’d select Mixed Mode (step 5)
• CRM Prerequisites – Scroll to section “Installing pre-requisites in Dynamics CRM Server 2011” – Walks through server roles that need to be installed on the CRM server.
• CRM Installation – Scroll to section “2011 Dynamics CRM Installation” – this walks you through the wizard installer screens. Note:
• License key - you should obtain this prior to beginning the CRM installation.
• Server Roles - See write up below assuming a 3 server configuration.
• Organizational Unit – This links to AD. 
• Recommended: Create an OU called MSCRM or similar (can hang off the main OU). Note. The OU is required for the installation. CRM just copies security groups into the OU (UserGroup, ReportingGroup, PrivUserGroup, SQLAccessGroup). It is good practice to use a separate OU rather than an existing OU.
• Service Accounts – per above
• Web site – recommend that we’ll install to the Default Web Site. If that’s an issue we can use the 5555 port. No real practical difference other than URL (if configuring IFD, the IFD URL will override this)
• Email Router – this will point to the server which will has the Email Router installed.
• Organization Settings 
• Display name should just be Your Company Name. This will create a database called YourCompanyName_MSCRM. Specify if you wish a different display name.
•  Review other settings - generally no need to change the defaults supplied
•  Reporting Server – This can point to any reporting server. Typically you would point to the report server of the database against which CRM is installed but if you have a dedicated reporting server, you can point it to that location.
• CRM Reporting Extensions – Scroll to section “Installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Reporting Extensions”
• This will be installed on the SQL Server Reporting Services instance which essentially allows authentication from CRM to pass through to SSRS. 
• Email Router – See server breakdown below for recommendation on which server to install
• Rollups – Applied as necessary to all the CRM products (CRM Server, Email Router, Reporting Extensions). The latest rollup can be obtained from here.

Production Server Breakdown

The following is the recommended set up in a production environment. If you do not have two application servers then combine the two app servers together.

Database Server

• SQL
• Reporting Extensions

Front End Server 

• CRM Pre-requisite roles (see above)
• Install CRM (all roles) and Disable the Back End Server Roles (Async Processing Service, Sandboxing Service)
• Having the roles available allows these roles to be started as a failover solution

Async Server (Mid Tier) 

• CRM Pre-requisite roles (see above)
• Install CRM and disable Front End Server Roles (Web Application Server, Organization Web Service, Discovery Web Service, Help Server)

Development/Test Server Breakdown

Typically it is sufficient for a development/test environment to be hosted on a single server. If that is the case, then install SQL and CRM with all server roles on the server.

Dynamics CRM Connectivity and Firewall Requirements

The Dynamics CRM team released a new white paper providing guidance for the connectivity requirements for typical Dynamics CRM on premise installations. It covers both regular on premise and IFD scenarios.

I don't think there's any earth shattering revelations made in this white paper and given that it is choc-full of riveting port settings requirements it is a real page turner (thankfully relatively short at 12 pages). All kidding aside this document is a good reference to file somewhere in your brain that you can pull out especially for those cases where the IT department has very rigid controls over their internal IT infrastructure.

I thought the following diagram (page 6) to be especially helpful as a visual guide although I'm not sure the dotted line between the client machine and the SQL Server is entirely accurate. I would think that it's necessary for all reporting requirements and not just for the Excel export function. That's unless you're not planning on having any custom reports or that all report development will be performed via RDP on the SQL server. Either way, I think it is unlikely in most installations for this to be a "dotted" line.

Other than that I also think the table on the following page provides a good summary that helps explain the overall picture to system administrators unfamiliar with the Dynamics CRM deployment footprint.

The white paper can be downloaded from here.

Read Optimized Forms

I have been wanting to check this new feature out for a while that was introduced along with update rollup 7. There is a pretty decent write up of this new feature and how it can be enabled in the MSDN blogs.

While this feature is interesting and can further optimize the time it takes to open a form there are some important limitations. That is if you scroll down to the bottom of the article it contains a table showing when the "read optimized form" is loaded. And you will quickly realize that if a form has client side scripts it cannot take advantage of this feature.

I tested this out. I took a completely vanilla invoice form and - as advertised - when I opened the record it opened in the nice and clean Read Optimized format.

I then went ahead and added a jscript web resource to the form. To be clear I just added the web resource that are "available to the form", I did not actually wire up any OnLoad, OnSave, or OnChange functions. That is, this web resource was effectively doing nothing.

After I published this, I onced again opened up the invoice form and the Read Optimized setting was no longer respected i.e. it opened in full edit mode. In short, the mere presence of a jscript resource will make the form non-Read Optimized capable.

I am sure there are reasons why it was designed this way. There is certainly some jscript logic that can be impeded by the Read Optimization. Although I guess I'm wondering why Microsoft couldn't have introduced a 7th form type (in addition to create, update, read, disabled, quick, and bulk) in order to target this form option rather than taking the "all or nothing" approach. Perhaps that will be accomodated in a future enhancement or perhaps I haven't properly considered the technical issues that would accompany such a feature...

Anyway, in terms of the practical usage of this feature in it's current incarnation - I have to say I'm a little skeptical.

First of all, it has to be said - what percentage of forms have no jscript acting on them? Jscript really brings tremendous flexibility to form rendering etc. to the extent that not many forms (at least the ones that I touch) remain jscript-less. And even for those that do not have any jscript acting on them - it is of course quite likely over the course of time that you'll want to add some scripting to the form to accomodate some customer requirement. And at this juncture - assuming the client has been happily using Read Optimization for this form - you'll have to explain to the client that this feature that they've now come to know and love will no longer be available.

So when all is said and done, I think I'll personally be employing this feature quite sparingly.

CRM 2011: Plugin Registration Tool Compiled Version

The Plugin Registration Tool for CRM 2011 can of course be downloaded from CodePlex:

http://pluginregcrm2011.codeplex.com/

However the download from CodePlex contains the source code and needs to be compiled in Visual Studio before it can be used. In case you want to circumvent this compilation step, you can download the executable from the location below:

http://www.sentri.com/ProductDownloads/PluginRegistration.zip

Reassigning personal views for disabled CRM users

The ability to share personal views in CRM with other users in CRM is a powerful tool. It allows for a central admin users to create or assist other users with creating views and thereafter they can be assigned to individual users or to a group of users. When sharing these views the user has the ability to limit the permissions on the shared views. For example, you may want to share a view but prevent the users who this view has been shared with from deleting the view. That can make sense especially in cases where the shared view is shared amongst a group of users and you do not want to give any individual user the arbitrary opportunity to accidentally or intentionally delete that view and inadvertently have that action ripple across the organization.

This all works very nicely... until the power user who has assigned all his/her views to other users leaves the organization and you want to manipulate these shared views in cases where that manipulation (write, delete, share to others) has been limited. One obvious solution is to have the IT admin temporarily update the AD credentials for this user so you can log into CRM as this user and re-assign the views to a new power user.

But the above action is not always an option. And fortunately there is another better option. Enter the Microsoft CRM 4.0 Administration Console. This console has a number of useful functions including tools for managing security roles but we are just going to focus on the ability to copy personal views for the specific scenario mentioned in this write up.

Below are the steps to copy the personal views:

• Download the console from codeplex
• Launch and enter the credentials and select the "Manage Views" utility

• In the ensuing form, first select "Get Users/Clear Cache". You can click just click Ok to select all users in the organization or you can filter by Business Unit

• Then perform the following steps to assign views from one user to another user
• In View Types ensure only "Main Application View (MAV)" view and "- Filter Active Views" are selected
• Right Column: Select the user you wish to assign from
• Middle Column: Select the view or views you wish to assign (use Ctrl and Shift for multi-select)
• Right Column: Select the user or users you wish to assign the views to (use Ctrl and Shift for multi-select)
• Click "Activate Views for Selected Users" and Confirm