Manda QoP

A week was spent doing battle with virtual machines, setting up servers, sorting out IIS, SQL Server, AD etc etc... and when everything was in place, Dynamics CRM was installed. More time was then spent making sure that the install would make it past the verification page and at long last we had a beautifully set up instance of Dynamics CRM running on a virtual server, attached to our domain and residing on my PC. Life was good. Then someone unintentionally broke it before I'd had a chance to take a copy of the virtual machine, except that because of what was broken it wouldn't have mattered if we'd had a copy as the AD links and machine name were toasted on the domain. Pants! So next came the mission to fix things. Several options were tried and after much hair pulling eventually the domain was recognizing the server again. Once the server was back in play there was an attempt to connect to the Dynamics CRM site but lady luck was not with us that day and we received the er...

This could be interesting to watch: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33196816/ns/ technology_and_science-space/

I've created an installation check list for Microsoft Dynamics CRM based upon my experiences during installation and also including some of the notes from the planning guide provided by Microsoft. It's attached as a word document and you can download it from the right hand side of this page .

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1. When checking for updates you get an error. No problem, hit the back button and try again and it should work the second time. 2. It wants to install visual C++ runtime every time, this is a known issue - doesn't take too long to reinstall it each time thankfully. 3. Install thinks SQL Full Text Search is not installed - make sure you have the latest update of Dynamics CRM before installing, it's a known bug that has been fixed in a patch (of course, you should also make sure that you've started the service).

I have finally made it past the verification screen. Dynamics CRM is now installing on the virtual server. On the plus side - all this mucking around has given me a good idea of what to double and triple check before even trying to start the install. :) 1. Make sure you have a Dynamics CRM AD group setup with permissions. The network support guys really don't like letting you have access to their servers so this is a good alternative solution. Get them to set up a group and give you permissions to that. 2. Install SQL Server 2008 with everything installed. 3. Make sure IIS is installed and running 4. Make sure Windows Server is totally up to date with its patches 5. Head on in to control panel, administrative tools, services - make sure Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator are both started. 6. Open SQL Server Configuration Manager - make sure all the services are started and using an account with access rights. I used NT Authority\NetworkServi...

The Dynamics CRM installing is still going on.... this has to be the hardest install of software ever. It was easier installing Red Hat ten years ago. This is a completely fresh install on a nice new Windows 2003 virtual server. SQL 2008 is installed, IIS etc... basically all the requirements from the planning doc are there, I spent several days making sure they were there, and ALL services are running with the correct access rights including the full text search, but can I get past the verification screen on the CRM install? Nope. For some reason it thinks the full text search is not installed. I'm getting to the point where banging my head repeatedly against the wall may be more productive than doing this install. I'm losing a lot of time here that could be spent on other work.