Manda QoP

I've had the Avatar game on pre-order for a wee while and was very happy to receive it last week on release day. I was expecting a box to arrive with a pair of swanky red and green glasses after all the 3D hype, but I guess the Wii version isn't 3D as no swanky glasses for me. I am a tad disappointed in that side of things. Anyhoo... on to the game itself. I started playing Avatar last week and am really impressed with the beautiful World that has been created. The game is smooth to play and I'm enjoying that on the Wii you use the nunchuck and wiimote to leap around the lounge hitting invaders with a spear. I'm very much looking forward to the parts that involve the balance board as well. I've always been a fan of these type of games, where you're running around collecting weapons and killing foes on the way, but the added dimension of having to actually wave your arms around instead of just pressing buttons really is fun. Now, if they could create a ...

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...