July 2009 - Posts
Fellow colleague and MVP Aaron Elder, recently posted an article on Technet regarding troubleshooting CRM. Aaron is one of the best troubleshooters I know and I highly recommend this read. Check it out here
The official blog post: Product Release: Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is available as a free download and supports the product's full customization and multi tenant capabilities. Those capabilities allow organizations to deploy a CRM solution for one set of workers and, using the same software licenses and hardware, develop instantly mobilized xRM solutions for a wide variety of other business needs using point and click tools.
Keep in mind that the Mobile Express client installs CRM Update Rollup 5 as well so make sure your applications have been tested before deploying:
Downloading and installing Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM also downloads and installs Update Rollup 5 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (KB 970141) on your server, a tested, cumulative set of updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. It includes performance enhancements that are packaged together for easy deployment.
The Deployment Administrator of CRM 4 allows you to manage and create multiple organizations (also referred to as multi-tenancy). Creating multiple tenants is great because it creates a separate instance of CRM with it's own customizations, users, data, etc. To access these additional tenants, CRM parses the url and directs accordingly. When a user navigates to http://crmserver they are taken to their default organization. To specify an org they would change the url to http://crmserver/orgName where orgName is the name of the organization. Sometimes a user will be a member of multiple organizations. When a user is a member of multiple orgs, the default org will be the first org the user joined. The MSCRM_CONFIG database stores this information and manages it for you. Changing this setting seems to be simple but it turns out not to be.
The Deployment Manager allows a Deployment Administrator to specify the "default organization". One would think that this setting would default the organization of http://crmserver to the org listed as default but it turns out not to. This setting is actually used for legacy code and callouts that use the 2006 web service endpoint. Since this endpoint is not multi-tenant aware the code will run against the organization marked as the default. See this article for more details regarding legacy support and multi-tenancy: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc151075.aspx.
To change this setting in a supported way requires an admin to download a tool provided by Microsoft at the following site: http://blogs.msdn.com/crmlandia/archive/2009/02/04/por-qu-la-organizaci-n-por-defecto-no-cambia-cuando-la-modificamos-en-el-administrador-de-implementaciones.aspx. Unfortunately this post is written in Spanish, but the tool works just the same. The tool is an ASP.NET page that is added to CRM through the ISV.config. The readme contains all of the details on how to install the tool in English.
Special thanks to Corey Hanson from the product team for the explanation.
I just found out that Microsoft has awarded me MVP for the 2nd year! What a great last few weeks! CRM Partner of the Year and now MVP again! You can checkout my company's website here and my MVP profile here