Unable to Add Multiple Users via the Wizard
We had a weird problem at a customer site where we could add any users one by one via the 'New User' button but when using the Add multiple users in the New User Wizard, not all users where showing.
After escalation at Ms Support, it turns out it was related to the way the PreferredDC Registry Key is handled (this registry key allows to specify a specific DC by name so that MSCRM AD calls are routed preferably to that DC) and the way replication worked between those specifics DC .
I quote MS Support :
"When you are adding one-by-one users it is firstly searching from the specified DC, and if nothing found it searches for the whole Domain – that’s a reason why you are able to add users one-by-one.
But when using “Add multiple users” it searches only for the specified DC."
That's quite interesting as I always thought 'Preferred' means exactly that, but it turns out it is only valid for the non wizard approach.
Anyway, the first DC should have known all needed users but that particular PreferredDC was not replicating all info, so changing the registry key to a 'better' DC solved the issue.
Btw, the reason we need to have this registry key setup in that case is because we sometimes routed AD calls to invalid DCs (ie: DCs not mounted properly/completely) which led to weird authentications issues.
Weekly Digest 20/5/2011
Here's a summary of this week interesting (at least for me ;) information related to Dynamics CRM.
Microsoft has released an update of the deployment guide for CRM 2011
There will be a change in Microsoft Volume Licensing from July which now includes Cloud Deployment, more information here
The CRM team blog has released source code for Bing Map Integration and Hierarchical Tree View
Here's a link to all known Build numbers for CRM 4.0
There's a quite nice series of articles on interacting with the webservices from javascript by Paul Way.
Mscrm Blogger as a published a very useful reference article on what is supported or unsupported in MSCRM 2011.
Gonzalo Ruis reminds us of the new cleaning option for asynchronous processes in CRM 2011.
Here's an article on Banking and Microsoft CRM by Kevin Wessels.
Qurius has a nice article on embedding images in CRM Forms.
Solutions and base languages
I got a question today about using solutions developped on a base language (ie: English) and using them on an implementation with another base language (ie: Dutch).
This was an issue in CRM 4.0 as you had to "hack" the generated XML in an unsupported way to use a customization in another base language.
After a bit of research, this is indeed a lot better in CRM 2011 as there's no block importing a solution from one base language to another.
From this SDK article, I quote "If labels for the base language of the target system are not provided in the solution package the labels of the base language of the source are used instead. For example, if you import a solution that contains labels for English and French with English as the base language, but the target system has Japanese and French with Japanese as the base language, English labels will be used instead of Japanese labels. The base languages labels cannot ever be null or empty."; thus importing an English based solution on a Dutch based system is no issue (of course you'd better have a Dutch translation in your solution but even that is not mandatory)
The only tricky part is the line above "When a solution is imported, labels for languages that are not available in the target system are discarded and a warning is logged."
Thus if you add a MUI language after you have imported the solution, the corresponding labels will not be available and you would have to force an update of the solution or extract the language translation for a manual import.
Also, CRM2011 Rollup 1 fixes a related issue with MUI Report Wizards ("When you import a solution that contains wizard reports and the wizard reports use different languages, the solution cannot be imported if those languages are not enabled")
Thus the recommendation would be to have all needed (ie: that the customer intends to use) MUI packs installed before importing solutions.
I still need to make a test environment with an English based, Dutch and French solution (what we mostly use in Belgium) and importing in an unmatching setup (Base Dutch+MUI French or vice-versa) to see what happens when the original base language is not present as it seems to trigger some issues.
Daily Digest 12/5/2911
A new e-mail configuration article is available "How to configure the Dynamics CRM on-premises and Dynamics CRM Online E-mail Router in different deployment scenarios".
Dynamics CRM 2011 has been certified for use on Citrix XenApp 5 and 6, more information on the Citrix Website.
Brad Koontz has written a nice article about the future evolution of email, I particularly like this quote "disruptive technologies don't kill their predecesors; they just change them".
Latest Kb Articles
Here's the latest released KB Articles
Dynamics CRM 2011
| KB Link | Date | Title |
| 2544388 | 28/04/2011 | After applying CRM 2011 updates, an error occurs when the Microsoft Dynamics Connector plugin executes. |
Dynamics CRM 4.0
| KB Link | Date | Title |
| 2477746 | 05/05/2011 | Update Rollup 17 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is available |
| 2520714 | 05/05/2011 | You experience slow performance when Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 runs a search in a complex Active Directory environment |
| 2535327 | 05/05/2011 | Error message when you run the database plug-in assembly in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0: "This implementation is not part of the Windows Platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms" |
| 2540055 | 05/05/2011 | The synchronization process enters an endless loop when you synchronize data to Outlook in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 client for Outlook |
| 2488579 | 06/05/2011 | The Microsoft Dynamics CRM E-mail Router cannot process incoming or outgoing email messages |
| 2527536 | 06/05/2011 | Error message when you try to assign a record to a user after you install Update Rollup 15 in the Turkish version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0: "Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown |