After an upgrade from CRM 3.0 to CRM 4.0 I noticed that items no longer deleted immediately. It seemed as if they eventually deleted, but I couldnt tell you when. From what I’ve heard from Microsoft and others, the problem is a trigger that is supposed to be disabled or removed during the upgrade. The fix was this:

1. In SQL Management Studio, expand the dbo.QueueItemBase table within your CRM database.
2. Expand the Triggers folder.
3. Right-Click the t_update_queueitembase trigger and disable it. (Select “disable” from the menu).

This may not address items that you have already deleted that are still pending deletion. To correct those, perform the following SQL command:

UPDATE dbo.QueueItemBase
SET DeletionStateCode = 2
WHERE QueueId = ‘YOUR_GUID_HERE’

You’ll have to find the GUID of the Queue you’re trying to delete from, but it’s pretty straightforward after that.

In Microsoft CRM 4.0, many of the entities arent immediately available in the Outlook address books.  An example of this is Contacts and Leads.  To synchromize the CRM Address book in the Outlook client with the contacts and leads, you need to change some of the CRM options in the Outlook client.  To do this:

1. In outlook, with the CRM 4.0 client installed, select the CRM menu from the Outlook menu bar and select “Options”
2. On the “Address Book” tab select the following options
   • Match all contacts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
   • Match all items in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
3. Click OK to set your personal options
4. Select “Synchronize with CRM” from the CRM menu on the Outlook menu bar to manuall sync the address books and test by trying to add a CRM contact as an email recipient.

If you receive this error message upon accessing Microsoft CRM 4.0 for the first time after an upgrade, chances are you are simply using the wrong URL.  It is important to note that because of the new multi-tenancy feature in CRM 4.0 it is now necessary to reference the Organization name in the URL.  The correct format for the homepage for example is:

http://servername:5555/organizationname/

As always, if you are looking for professional Microsoft CRM Consulting for assistance with installation, migration, or upgrade, contact Kazmarek Technology Solutions directly.

I received this error message during the CRM 4.0 Upgrade:

“There is already an object named ‘AttributeTypes’ in the database”

It turns out that this error message is poorly designed and doesnt describe the actual cause of the error which was the ftcat_documentindex issue discussed here:

http://blog.kazmarek.com/2008/03/11/full-text-index-inconsistency-when-upgrading-to-crm-40/

I received the following error in the environmental diagnostics wizard during an upgrade to CRM 4.0:

“The full-text indexes on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM database are not consistent with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 full-text indexes.”

After some research, MS article 927226 pointed me to the log file from the installation found here:

C:Documents and SettingsuserApplication DataMicrosoftMscrmLogscrm40svrsetup.log

Looking for the error message towards the bottom of the log, I found where it referenced the table with the inconsistency.  this section of the log looked like this:

21:54:13|   Info| tableowner:                             dbo
21:54:13|   Info| tablename:                              documentindex
21:54:13|   Info| fulltextkeyindexname:          cndx_primarykey_documentindex
21:54:13|  Error| remark:                                  modified full-text index

Looking at the table in question, dbo.DocumentIndex, I was able to determine that it didn’t have any full-text indexes.  After some research, I discovered that it was in fact suppoed to…you can run the following commands to check this:

Command: sp_help_fulltext_tables
Expected Results:

dbo DocumentIndex cndx_PrimaryKey_DocumentIndex 1 1 ftcat_documentindex

Command: sp_help_fulltext_columns
Expected Results:

dbo 1205579333 DocumentIndex Title 9 NULL NULL 1033
dbo 1205579333 DocumentIndex KeyWords 11 NULL NULL 1033
dbo 1205579333 DocumentIndex SearchText 12 NULL NULL 1033

The fix then was to create a new full-text catalog for the table.  The steps I followed are:

1. Right-click the dbo.DocumentIndex table and select “Full-Text Index”
2. Select the defaults (click “Next”) until you get to the column selection.
3. Select the following columns to include in the index:
   • KeyWords
   • SearchText
   • Title
4. Select the defaults the rest of the way through and name the catalog ftcat_documentindex.

After creating the full-text catalog, full-text indexing will be enabled on that table.  This will cause another error in the CRM 4.0 setup, so right-click the table again and choose “Disable Full-Text Index” from the “Full-Text Index” menu.

As always, if you are looking for professional Microsoft CRM Consulting for assistance with installation, migration, or upgrade, contact Kazmarek Technology Solutions directly.

With the CRM 3.0 Client for Outlook, you may experience prompting for credentials occasionally.  Normally, CRM 3.0 should be using Windows Authentication and as a logged-in member of the domain you shouldn’t ever be prompted for credentials to access CRM (either via the web or Outlook client).  To resolve this occasional prompting, there are usually 2 things that must be done:

1. Check to ensure that the URL used for accessing CRM from the Outlook client is a member of the Intranet Security Zone in Internet Explorer.  To do this, open a new Internet Explorer window and type the URL in the address bar.  Check the right hand side of the status bar at the bottom of the screen where the zone is displayed.  If it is not in the Intranet Zone, please add it in your Internet Options.

2. Change the following registry entry to “0” instead of “1”.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMAINFeatureControlFEATURE_SUBDOWNLOAD_LOCKDOWNOutlook

 After making these modifications, clear your temporary internet files and cookies.

For a while, I was unable to get CRM 4.0 installed because I kept running into an error stating that the “registerasyncserviceaction” failed.  I tried numerous things to resolve this issue including checking registry permissions, service permissions, completely removing all traces of CRM and starting from scratch, etc…nothing worked!

 Finally, I came across something in the Application event log which initially seemed completely unrelated.  It was event id 3012 and 3011 from LoadPerf. It basically said that the performance counter registry strings were invalid.  After researching this error, I found that the solution was to rebuild the Perf Counter strings using the command “lodctr /r”.  The command took a little while but once it was completed I was able to reinstall CRM without a hitch!

By default, the maximum file size that can be uploaded as an attachment in Microsoft CRM 3.0 is 5Mb.  To change this,  I have found that there are really 4 steps:

1) Modify the following registry key (on the server) appropriately:

Key Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMSCRMmaxuploadfilesize
Value: The value is the desired byte limit.  1Mb = 1048576 bytes so if you wanted the limit to be 20Mb the decimal value for the registry setting would be 20971520. 

2) If you want the ability to upload more than 8Mb then you need to increase the .Net maximum request length by modifying the CRM web.config file.  To do this, navigate to the folder containing the MS CRM web files on the server or use the IIS Manager to explore the folder contents (right-click on CRM website, select explore).  Locate the web.config file and edit in Wordpad.  Locate the “maxRequestLength” value and change it appropriately (this time in kb).  For our example of 20Mb the value would be “20480”. 

3) Change the “maxuploadfilesize” key on the client machine.  Follow the instructions in step 1, but this time, the key is located here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftMSCRMClientmaxuploadfilesize

4) Restart the IIS services.  Go to Start->Run->iisreset

If you have the Microsoft CRM Laptop client for Outlook installed and it doesnt display the Go Offline button on the toolbar or allow you to select local data then you may need to look for the following registry key and change the value appropriately:

“HKEY_Current_UserSoftwareMicrosoftMSCRMClientLightClient”

This is a Decimal value that determines in part if you are using the light client or not.  Make sure this is set to 0 if you intend to use the laptop client and restart Outlook to test.

After changing his domain password, a user may not be able to access CRM (Outlook or Web Client) without first being prompted for his username and password.  This seems to occur if the user had to previousely enter a username and password to access CRM because he was not connected to the domain during login (i.e. a remote user connecting through a VPN) and that user selected the option to save the password to the password list.  From that point forward, it seems as if CRM will use that cached password for authentication instead of the actual domain credentials provided during logon.  When the user changes their password on the domain, it creates a discrepency between the password in the password list and the actual password needed to authenticate with CRM, resulting in the prompt for credentials. 

 To resolve this you can attempt to access CRM via the web client and when prompted for credentials, check the option to save to the password list.  This will effectively replace the previousely cached credentials with the new ones.