Since before the Christmas break we have been working on a project that requires us to get an installation of Microsoft CRM 3.0 server up and running; and to be brutally honest it has not been easy.
Yesterday I decided that one of the ways to get rid of some of the errors we were having was to create a brand new Virtual Machine as the one we had been using had been installed, removed and reconfigured during initial development phases.
This started off well enough with the following steps being taken:
- Install Windows 2003 Standard Edition and join to domain
- Patch Windows
- Add IIS and SMTP components
- Install MS SQL 2005 Standard Edition
- Install MS CRM 3.0
This seems to be the best way to approach this, but it would not work in the end.
Problem
When a user is added to CRM, the software itself checks to ensure that the user already exists in the Active Directory for the domain. If it does nothing much happens until the end when it informs you the user cannot be found which you would expect.
The problem occured when we tried to add a user that did indeed exist in the AD, but the CRM software would just come back with a standard error message asking us to contact our system administrator, which is me!
The only bit of logging I could find was in the standard W3SVC logging directory for the website and gave the rather cryptic code error:
/_common/error/dlg_error.aspx
hresult=Not%20available&errMessage=Index%20was%20out%20of%20range.%20Must%20be%20non-negative%20and%20less%20than%20the%20size%20of%20the%20collection.%0AParameter%20name%3A%20index
80 t5m\administrator 192.168.16.97
Mozilla/4.0+(compatin/ ble;+MSIE+7.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322;n/ +.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;+InfoPath.1)
200 0 0
Resolution
In true Conchango style I sent an email to the community to see if we had anyone that had the answer to this problem. As it turned out no one reply was 100% accurate, but many people did reply and it started me thinking of the different .NET versions that are installed on the server. Thanks to all the pointers everyone.
The installation steps that I took to get the software up and running actually meant that the .NET 1.1 (which comes as standard with Windows 2003 Standard) was deregistered from IIS - this is thanks to MS SQL 2005 as that installs .NET 2.0 and rather unhelpfully stops IIS from being able to use .NET 1.1
Once it was clear that CRM required 1.1 to run (which seems very strange) I started to poke around the default website of IIS and found that .NET 2 was the default engine but i was not able to select the 1.1 version I required, although it was installed. The answer here is to use a utility that is actually in the .NET 1.1 directory called aspnet_regiis.exe with the command switch -i.
For example:
%SYSTEMROOT%\windows\Microsoft .NET\framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_regiis.exe -i
This command will run for a small period of time and then will state it has finished. When I went back to the configuration for the website in IIS I was indeed now able to select the correct version of .NET for use with the website.
Pain points
The following points are some off the issues that I have found with CRM that make the software an unfriendly beast.
- CRM does not have any logging capabilities except to the web logs, so when it tells the user to 'contact your System Administrator' the System Administrator will be no wiser than the user
- It is not possible to install CRM Client once and have it work in various profiles of Outlook
- Unless the offline-ready version of the CRM Client is installed it is not possible to change the directory in which the software will be installed
- It is not possible to install CRM on an Outlook client that is part of another domain as it is not possible to specify a different user for authentication