Showing related forms

by | May 30, 2007

One thing I appreciate about good blogs is the viral spreading of interesting stuff, so that good solutions arn’t just available in some corner of the world, but can be used all over. I believe this is one of the real assets of working with the great products MS CRM and MS SharePoint.

I try to keep track of quite a few different blogs and when I find something interesting I (as you have seen before) usually add a posting linking to this blog. This way, I hope you will find my blog even more usefull since you shouldn’t really need to keep track of all blogs yourself. (if your interests match mine, that is of course)

On one of the blogs I subscribe to, I found an interesting post concerning how to add related forms into existing forms in MS CRM. This can be very usefull when customers demand GUI modification. So, please have a look: http://blogs.msdn.com/mscrmfreak/archive/2007/05/30/ui-customizations-on-your-coffee-break.aspx

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Kerberos / Trust Delegation

by | May 30, 2007

As some of you might have experienced the easiest way to deploy MS CRM 3 is to have SQL Server and SQL RS on the same machine, this will let you duck from a lot of problems, so if you don’t know better and have no reason not to, choose this setup.

However, this is not always what is best. The most common scenario when this is not the case is when a company has a large SQL Cluster (or just a dedicated SQL Server) and for several reasons (mainly licensing and maintance) want to have the CRM database and CRM reports on the central SQL server. Now, I am not an expert at this, but I have tried to dive in to it a bit and I have found the following:

If you are running the application pool of CRM, application pool of SQL RS and the main SQL server as Network Service, you will usually be fine, it will probably work more or less out of the box.

However, if not, you will get a warning in the installation of CRM saying something like “SPN not set correctly” for SQL RS. You can, if you like, install CRM anyway, but reports will only work when running them directly using Report Manager/Report Server or when running IE from the CRM server. Since it is not best practice to have the CRM server double as a terminal server, this is not often very nice.

So, what’s wrong? The problem lies in that all requests from SQL RS to the SQL database, are done using the technique “impersonation” which means that all requests in the database are run as the “current user”/the user that is running IE. This is a very good feature since it among other things enables the Filtered Views in the SQL database the only returns the items that the current user has access to. The problem is that CRM is acting HTTP proxy for the SQL RS and as such cannot send the current users credentials to the Report Server.

What needs to be done? Well, the CRM server user must be set up to enable trust delegation (i.e. forwarding of credentials) and the service users running the CRM apppool, SQL RS app pool and SQL must have the correct SPN:s set for them.

There are several documents and blogs describing how this can be set up, Sonoma Partner has one and the document with the short title: Additional Tasks When Microsoft SQL Reporting Services is installed on a separate server from Microsoft CRM or Microsoft SQL Server by Microsoft is also a good help.

The biggest problem usually is that you will have to run the “setspn” tool on the service account that is running the SQL Cluster/dedicated SQL machine and even though that shouldn’t cause any problems, if it does, and you are running x number of business critical applications on the SQL server, you might be in for a long night…

My suggestion is that you first try to set this up in a demo environment and when you got it working, then redo it on the live environment on a late friday afternoon, and make sure you havn’t got anything planned for the weekend…

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Avoiding IIS Reset

by | May 30, 2007

Both in SharePoint development and CRM development, IISReset is needed sometimes to release fileholds. For instance, when developing callouts in MS CRM, the callout.config file will be blocked (by w3wp-crmapppool) as soon as a callout has been run.

The biggest problem with IISReset (or shuting the IIS down, compiling, restarting it) is that the entire application will be “just-in-time-compiled” each time, taking huge amounts of time especially when developing on virtual pc:s with only 1 GB (or less) of memory.

The workaround for this is to recycle the application pool for the IIS-website instead of restarting the entire IIS.

The easiest way of doing this is to right-click on the applicationpool and the choose “recycle”.

This can be scripted (as described on Patrick Tissegheims blog) by using the script:

cscript c:windowssystem32iisapp.vbs /a “SharePointDefaultAppPool” /r

Or as Patrick also mentions, there is a good tool for doing this, that can be found here:

http://www.harbar.net/articles/APM.aspx

So, that might easy your troubles, and save you some time.

If you are compiling on the server, my suggestion is to add the script to the pre build events in the project.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

How to mass import lots of mails

by | May 29, 2007

This blog posting shows how to add lots of emails to CRM that do not have a tracking token.

One issue with this solution is that many emails should still be added to specific accounts, orders, incidents etc. There is no simple solution but I would use the advanced search and bulk edit function to set the “regarding” field of all emails.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se