Trying out integrating SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft CRM has been on my to-do list for quite a while now. I finally found some time so you can expect some blog posts about this in the coming weeks. First thing to do installing Microsoft CRM 4.0 on my SharePoint developer VPC.
Make sure that you check out the requirements – so download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Implementation guide – first thing I had to do is installing Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. Other warnings are unfortunately only provided after you have completed a number of steps so here are some other things to watch out for:
- Make sure that the Windows Indexing Service is running – you can disable it after installation since it is only used to index help files (Microsoft does not recommend this)
- Make sure that you have SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 installed
- Make sure that the SQL Server Agent is running.
Different steps in installation:
- Specify Server Roles: I installed both the CRM Application Server Role (provides the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web user interface and services) and CRM Platform Server Role (used to deploy the asynchronous services, such as the Workflow and Bulk E-mail services) on the same machine.
- Specify Deployment options: create a new deployment or connect to an existing one and select the SQL Server you will use. You can use SQL Server 2008 together with CRM 4.0 but you will need to install some additional hotfixes – see Microsoft Support KB 957053 - I still used SQL 2005.
- Specify Organization Name and currency options
- Select Web Site – specify web site where you want to host the CRM web user interface
- Specify Reporting Services Server
- Select the Organization Unit in Active Directory – during installation a number of security groups are created – specify where you want them to be created.
- Specify security account – used for the CRM service accounts and the ASP.NET application pool account. I used the domain admin account of the domain in my virtual environment – definitely not a best practice but this is a dev environment so :-) …
- Specify email router settings – I skipped this one – gave me a warning. If you are not configuring e-mail integration noew, after Microsoft Dynamics CRM Email Router setup is complete, you must add the E-Mail Router server name to the PrivUsersGroup in AD
- System Requirements check – kind of awkward that is does another check at the end – it could have indicated some issues a lot sooner.
Next, you will probably need some test data within your CRM demo environment. First you will need to install Microsoft CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager – next download the Microsoft CRM 4.0 Sample Data (On-premise Edition) and walk through the CRM Sample Database readme to perform the import of the data.
All in all everything went quite smoothly although I got a very weird error when I first opened the CRM 4.0 web interface – I resolved this one by making sure the CRM service account was added to the different AD groups which were created during the installation. Next time let’s see how we can integrate SharePoint and CRM.
Hi there, interesting post, I'm planning a similar VPC setup myself. Couple of questions:
ReplyDelete- Are you finding VPC performance OK (how much memory have you allocated to the VM)?
- I'm assuming the VM already had a full SharePoint 2007 install, so did you need to specify a non-stanrard port for CRM?
I have 1500 MB assigned to the VPC - and performance is OK. I used port 5555 for my CRM web interface.
ReplyDelete