Having installed CRM (both v3 and v4) on Windows 2003 Server-based systems literally hundreds of times over the past few years, you get into a routine of being able to fix things before they break.  On Win2003 there were a few settings you could check before you installed CRM that would ensure the installer finished the first time.

Yesterday I did my first install on Windows 2008 Server.  Luckily, I spend some time in the CRM Public newsgroups and knew there were a lot of people that ran into a lot of snags while trying to get CRM 4.0 working on Win2008.  But their misfortune was my good fortune - Microsoft had received enough questions that they created a KB article on common issues resolution.  Armed with this KB, I went in with my usual 'what could possibly go wrong?' attitude.

To be honest, the CRM installation went pretty smoothly, but I am getting ahead of myself.  My first task was to get SQL Server and SSRS i ...

I was searching the internet for something the other day, and stumbled across a rather unconventional Microsoft CRM Case Study on YouTube of all places.  The video was from 2006, but I'd never seen it before.

If you have 3 minutes and don't mind some satire, it's well worth the time.

Check out the YouTube video here.

Dave

Business Data Catalog (BDC) - of SharePoint 2007 allows to present data from non SharePoint system on SharePoint UI. Not only display, BDC can also crawl and index data!

We use BDC to extract data from MS CRM database (using API, direct database access or web service) and display on SharePoint Site using out of the box business data web parts shipped along with BDC. SharePoint Designer is then used to edit XSL of BDC web parts as needed for rich formatting.

Combination of BDC and SharePoint Designer allows us to cater MS CRM Data in customized style and format as required by our customers.

Several of our clients have noticed that, and commented on, when the CRM for Outlook component is installed, and Outlook is running, the 'Settings' module in the CRM web is hidden from view.

Several of our adventerous client users have suggested overcoming the problem by clearing the Temporary Internet Files while Outlook is opened, and refreshing the CRM web page.  That will work, but for a long-term solution, but good friends at East Region Microsoft CRM provide the following suggestion:

a) Close CRM web and Outlook
b) Click on Start -> Run.  Type 'regedit'
c) Browse to the tree: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient\
d) Find 'Ser ...

Background

After my initial end user introduction to CRM, I found that CRM provides great User Interface customization and you may know about this. You can add tabs, sections, IFRAME, fields so that you're not bound to displaying a field at a specific place in a form.

In particular, IFRAME is great as any external page can be presented in it without browsing elsewhere or opening a new window, and SharePoint page is no exception. After providing URL to SharePoint site for an IFRAME, I realized that some of UI components on SharePoint page distract users. For example, SharePoint's top n ...