Uninstalling Employee Self Service Portal – step by step

Uninstalling Employee Self Service Portal – step by step

by | Mar 4, 2019

A customer of involontarily gotten a Dynamics 365 Employee portal installed. I had to remove it. It has 21 (!?) solutions which are interdependent. This is how I fixed it.

As always, I start off by trying to find if anyone else has run into the same issue, almost. This guy had with another portal type:
https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/dynamicscrmbestpractices/archive/2017/10/14/dynamics-365-uninstalling-microsoft-portals-steps 

And then my Portal buddy Nick Doelman did some heavy lifting (he actually does!) and sent me this link. It did turn out to be a bit old though. Still useful, but the solutions described in it are not entirely accurate.

https://community.dynamics.com/365/b/dynamics365portalssupport/archive/2017/02/27/portal-troubleshooting-part-three-uninstalling-portal-solutions 

Sitemap

First of all, before you do anything else, start by removing the following things from the sitemap (unless you havn’t added more things pointing to Portal components)

1. The entire Portal “Area”
2. The SubArea and Group under Settings for Portal Settings.

Solution removal

So which solutions are we to uninstall? I will take it from the top, in the order I uninstalled them.

1 ESSPortal
2 BaseHtmlEditor_portal
3 MicrosoftForumsWorkflows
4 MicrosoftForums
5 Feedback
6 KnowledgeManagement

When removing KnowledgeManagement I got this error:
The entity with ObjectTypeCode = 10460 was not found in the MetadataCache
Tried different way, after some time, just refreshed and it was gone. Maybe this should be removed earlier. Not entirely sure which entity this was, as it was removed and I didn’t save a metadata reference before starting.

7 MicrosoftAzureStorage
8 MicrosoftBingMapsHelper
9 CustomerService
10 WebNotification
11 MicrosoftGetRecordIDWokrflowHelper
12 MicrosoftIdentity
There are two dialogs that 
Process/Dialog – Change Password, Removed all Steps. Save & Close
Reset Security Stamp – Removed all steps. Save & Close

13 MicrosoftIdentityWorkflows
14 MicrosoftIdentitySystemWorkflows
15 MicrosoftCrmPortalBaseWorkflows
16 MicrosoftCrmPortalBaseSystemWorkflows
17 Portal Timeline
18 MicrosoftWebForms

When removing this solution I also got the same weird error: The entity with ObjectTypeCode = 10439 was not found in the MetadataCache. 

What I found was that it was actually the sitemap that I hadn’t cleaned up from Portal things. This is why I recommend removing all portal related entries from all Sitemaps before starting to remove any solutions.

19 MicrosoftCrmPortalBase
20 MicrosoftCrmPortalDependencies
21 Portal Privacy Extensions

v9 GA and some problems with Solution deployment

v9 GA and some problems with Solution deployment

by | Oct 5, 2017

As many of you probably have noticed version 9.0 has just been released. If you havn’t, spin up a trial by clicking here: New Trial

It has a very nice and shiny UI which I really think you should try and some very other very nice new features. However, you should be a bit wary of using it in production environments just yet as there seems to be a bit too many serious bugs as described in this document:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/readme-9

I am working with a customer and we have a specific non-production instance we call “sandbox” which we use to test apps and features outside of the ALM (application lifecycle management) process, so we installed v9 or July Update as it is called and tried it out.

What I found when trying to deploy our unmanaged customization with all the entities which we have changed in the project, was that I got the weirdest error, it complained that it was missing an internal Microsoft Web Resource with the name of:
  “CampaignActivity_main_system_library.js”

So, I opened up the customization.xml (yes, all you oldtimers from CRM 3.0 time remember it as the true export file) and searched for the guid and the web resource name in the file. I found that it was actually used on the main form of Compaign Activitiy, and if you look at the read-me document I have linked above, it mentions that the Campaign Activity is one of the entities which does not work. Hence, there is probably some old code in there that Microsoft have decided to remove, and havn’t had time to replace.

So, the temporary fix to get our solution to work in Dynamics 365 v9.0 (July Release), go into the customization.xml and then manually remove all <Event> tags which include that webresource, and if the <Events> tag was empty, remove that too. Then put the customization.xml file back into the solution file and reimport it.

The campaign activity still won’t work but at least our solution imported. Perhaps there are similar issues with other entities.

I will expect this issue to go away very soon.

And on the issue of if it is ok and supported to manually edit (hack) the customization.xml file I am under the impression that it is as long as it actually import into a system without any forceful shoehorning as it is up to Dyn365 to validate it.

On monday, I will be heading to CRM UG Summit in Nashville which is sure to be a great trip. I am planning to try to make some video there which I will post here and on my Youtube, and don’t miss my session on if it is really is a fair fight to compare Online with Onprem? Guess what I will say?

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se