eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome takeaways

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Posted on 7th February 2013 by Jukka Niiranen in News and events

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eXtremeCRMThere are no more Microsoft Convergence events held in Europe, but luckily the eXtreme CRM organization has stepped in to arrange a bi-annual conference where all the Dynamics CRM professionals can meet up and share information & thoughts on what’s happening around the product and the surrounding ecosystem. Last year in Berlin was the first time I attended the eXtreme CRM conference and this year it was time to head down south to Rome for eXtreme CRM 2013. Here’s my travel report from the event, focusing on the product roadmap details that were revealed and the direction that Microsoft Dynamics CRM seems to be heading towards, based on my interpretation.

It’s been a bit rough

The opening keynote by Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, was a somewhat unusual appearance compared to the traditional Microsoft way of highlighting their past achievements and future opportunities. From the European viewpoint, the typical US style keynotes often go over the top in building up hype for the success of the products, but Bob came onto the stage with a different kind of a message. Basically he apologized for all the problems that have surrounded Dynamics CRM recently: the delay of cross-browser support, CRM Online performance/reliability issues and the sad saga of recent Update Rollups being pulled.

Bob_Stutz_eXtremeCRM_keynoteI think most of the MS partners in the room had shared the pain from these issues, especially when having to explain them on a day-to-day basis while working with customers. In the software business it’s of course nothing unheard of that  such problems may occur, but there’s been an elevated sense of frustration recently with the lack of information given to partners on what’s going on at Microsoft. Communication is the most effective cure in recovering from such events and I bet that it would have been far easier for all parties if there had been more transparent exchange of information on each of these issues earlier on, but it’s good to see the top management acknowledge this now and hopefully do what is necessary to straighten these things out.

One thing that Bob Stutz promised to change was to return the Update Rollups back to pure hotfix packages instead of vehicles for new feature delivery that they’ve turned into after Microsoft adopted the agile release policy for Dynamics CRM shortly after the 2011 version came out. What this means in practice is that MS will need to come up with a new delivery vehicle for introducing the new features into on-premise CRM environments at least once a year. While this can potentially improve the stability of those environments, the gap between CRM Online and on-premise feature release schedule can also grow even larger as a result of this, which could introduce it’s own challenges through an increased platform fragmentation.

The mobility story

This time last year Microsoft made a big announcement of their upcoming “CRM Anywhere” prodcut offering. Following the aforementioned turn of events, the cross-browser support got eventually delayed up until Polaris / Update Rollup 12 while the mobile strategy was gradually revised, scrapping their planned partnership with CWR Mobility and opting to develop in-house mobile apps instead. Individual pieces of news around the mobility offering have become available during the past fall and now at eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome the following mobility roadmap slide was presented:

Dynamics CRM Mobility Roadmap & Vision

From this slide and the accompanying presentation I was able to pick out the following pieces of data:

  • The iPad Safari web client that was postponed from the actual Polaris rollout is arriving this month for CRM Online customers, on-premise support will be in Orion
  • Tablet devices will receive a dedicated app, not only the Windows 8 Sales Workspace but also a similar iPad native app appears to be scheduled for Orion, with further Service and Marketing apps in the horizon
  • iPhone and Android support will be limited to the Mobile Express client even after Orion, all the way until Leo
  • No details on whether Windows Phone will receive any new features in addition to the WP7 Activity Feeds app that was released a bit over year ago
  • Customization options as well as offline data support will be rolled out gradually to these clients

One thing that Bob was emphasizing during the keynote was Microsoft’s decision not to charge additional licenses for access to these mobile and tablet applications. Choosing to take the longer route of build vs. buy in the mobile CRM gives MS a wider range of options to adjust their commercial offering to market needs, but the prolonged period of uncertainty means that many customers will also be postponing their investment decisions on mobile CRM deployment until they have facts available on what level of functionality is going to be baked into the core platform. At the same time ISV’s like Resco and more recently also CWR Mobility are working hard to be able to offer a HTML5 platform for developing customized mobile and tablet apps for Dynamics CRM for those customers who need to equip their mobile workforce with CRM solutions already today.

Update 2013-02-16: Microsoft partners can now download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobility Roadmap slide deck from PartnerSource (login required).

From Polaris to Orion via Gemini

The new “Flow” UI of Dynamics CRM has been rolled out to existing CRM Online customers. This has caused both a lot of excitement as well as anxiety, since the new design and integrations (Bing Maps, Yammer etc.) are very tempting to be demonstrated as the next generation user experience, but the feature set of Polaris takes away many of the standard customization options that rely on form event scripting. I’ve covered the Polaris new features & gotchas in a previous post, in case you haven’t had a chance to dig deeper into the updated CRM Online version yet. Just to repeat once more what I’ve been trying to emphasize ever since latest Statement of Direction document was released: on-premise customers won’t get the new UI with Update Rollup 12, it arrives in the Orion release.

Orion_the_next_version_of_Dynamics_CRMWith that in mind, let’s get the big news out of the way before digging any deeper: Orion is not an Update Rollup or even Service Update type of a release, it is the next major version of Dynamics CRM. In his closing keynote Bill Patterson pretty much confirmed that it would be called “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013″ (or 2014) for the on-premise customers. Not a whole lot of other details were shared, apart from the fact that the target release date is in Q3 2013. Although Bob Stutz was hesitant on giving any dates in his speech, July was mentioned more than once, but whether that refers to general availability or CRM Online is anybody’s guess as of now.

Before that, we’ll have time for another star in the spring sky: Gemini. Yes, it looks like there will be even more frequent releases for CRM Online than previously communicated. Gemini arrives in Q2 2013 and will focus on bringing the Marketing Pilot features acquired last October available to Dynamics CRM users. The feature set was shown in a very brief run through of slides, since the network issues that plagued the whole eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome event held at Marriott Park Hotel forced Bill to skip the live demo and resort to screenshots instead. Not much can be said about what to expect from Marketing Pilot at this stage, but here are some facts I picked up: (more…)

Signing up for CRM Online in the Microsoft Online Services era

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Posted on 30th July 2012 by Jukka Niiranen in News and events

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Starting from July 19th, you no longer can/need to use a Windows Live ID to sign up for a 30 day trial of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Instead you’re directed to the Microsoft Online Services Portal (a.k.a. MOP) to follow the same registration steps as you would when starting an Office 365 trial subscription. So, how does it work in practice then? Let’s sign up and see.

There are a few additional steps in the registration process now. In addition to specifying the name of your company, you also need to select a new domain name, such as “yourcompany.onmicrosoft.com”. You’re given the chance to check for domain name availability, but it’s important to note that this only checks the .onmicrosoft.com domain. Your actual CRM Online organization will still be at yourcompany.crm.dynamics.com (depending on the region) and if the name given already exists on that side, the CRM provisioning process will automatically adjust the URL (I sure hope it’s better than those org85fs321nad type of CRM organization name monsters we had before). Additionally, since we don’t yet have a Microsoft Online user account in this case (if we did, the process would be somewhat easier), we’ll need to provide a user name and password.

Once the data input has been accepted, we’re greeted with the administration portal that’s familiar to anyone who’s been managing an Office 365 subscription. Instead of the Exchange, Lync and SharePoint services we’ll see Dynamics CRM as the only available option. The actual provisioning process can take a while, so you may need to keep your eye on the spinner and refresh the screen quite a few times. In the US data centers the process took just a couple of minutes, but in EMEA I had to wait for half an hour before CRM was enabled in the Microsoft Online trial subscription. Presumably things will speed up as CRM becomes an everyday part of the Online portal.

Under Dynamics CRM there’s a Manage link, so let’s click on that and off we go… Ouch, grey screen! You weren’t using a non-IE browser, now were you? Just because Office 365 web apps are compatible with most browsers, doesn’t mean Dynamics CRM would be. Remember how that cross-browser support was re-scheduled to Q4 2012? That’s ok, it’s easy to forget such minor details. Also, since Microsoft still doesn’t want to make it clear to the potential customer what the system requirements for Dynamics CRM are, many of them will surely be greeted with the below screen once they login to their CRM Online trial with Chrome, Firefox or Safari, puzzled about why they’re seeing this mobile UI instead of the pretty charts and familiar Office experience they were promised.

After we click on the CRM link inside MOP with Internet Explorer, we get an additional dialog that used to be a part of the CRM Online sign-up form: selecting the base currency for the CRM organization. Once done, the familiar CRM provisioning screen is presented, alongside the promotional WMV video telling us how Dynamics CRM will improve your productivity etc. Wait a couple of minutes and you’re given the button to launch CRM Online.

From this point onward the user experience is exactly the way it used to be back in the Windows Live ID days. Once you go to add more users into your CRM Online subscription there is however something new in the UI: instead of allowing you to add new CRM user records, a popup window will instruct you that in order to add more users to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you’ll need to go to the Microsoft Office 365 Admin Portal.

Ok, let’s click on the Add and Licenses Users button. We’re taken to the Online Services portal and get to specify a name for the new user. There’s also a “bulk add” option available, but since that would require creating and uploading a CSV file, we’ll skip that for now. Similarly to the subscription administrator (the first CRM user you created), the new users will be given a user@yourcompany.onmicrosoft.com user name. You can enter more details for the user, but not an email address (more on that later).

Moving forward, we’re given the option to grant a CRM user license to the user. However, unlike the native CRM dialog windows for adding users, the MOP dialogs won’t allow you to assign any CRM security roles to the new users. Instead, you’ll need to go back to the Dynamics CRM administration menus to perform this operation. Don’t forget this part, as otherwise your users will have a user account but no access rights to CRM.

Ok, we’re now almost done and are presented with the option of sending details of the new user name and temporary password by email. By default the recipient will be the admin user. Don’t send it there. Why? Because even though it looks like an email address and MOP considers it to be one, there is no email service available for you to access this inbox. Remember: you’re just configuring a CRM Online trial, not Exchange Online. So put a real email address in there, or then just copy & paste the data from the next screen.

Once the new user account becomes available in the CRM users view (it can take a couple of minutes), you can open up the record and assign the required security roles to the user. Another thing you should do is to specify the real email address of the new user, so replace the @onmicrosoft address with a proper business email. While you’re at it, you may notice that not all user profile fields are available for editing on the CRM user form like they would normally be. Changing details like job title, main phone, mobile phone etc. needs to be done in the Microsoft Online Services portal and not CRM, as these are part of the user information maintained in MOP’s directory. Unlike in a traditional on-premises implementation with Active Directory, changes to the user profile fields will actually be updated onto the corresponding CRM user record after it has been created. See the following MSDN article for details: Sychronized Users in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365.

In addition to user management, also the subscription management for CRM Online now utilizes the Office 365 platform capabilities rather than the old system that was used for billing Xbox Live credits and other consumer services. What this means is that a potential customer might as well go and sign up for an Office 365 trial to go alongside their CRM Online trial. All it takes is finding the link under Subscriptions – Purchase – Microsoft Office 365 (Plan E3) – Trial and they can take the Exchange, SharePoint and Lync functionality for a test drive. Cross-sell opportunities galore!

Are there any benefits then for a customer who just wants CRM from the public cloud and not Office 365? Yes, because the new Microsoft Online based authentication allows setting up an integration with the existing Active Directory that the customer has. No need to manage separate credentials for CRM Online anymore if you configure AD federation between your domain and the cloud services hosted in Microsoft’s data centers to offer the users a single sign-on (SSO) experience. It requires some level of effort, though, so start by getting to know the following article: Plan for and deploy AD FS 2.0 for use with single sign-on.

Another nice addition is the access to a CRM Online Service Health dashboard. Similar to what Office 365 has offered, you can now also see information about the current status and pas issues related to various CRM Online service components. While Microsoft has actively promoted the new CRM Online Trust Center, effectively it’s just a static page with information regarding security policies and certifications. In comparison, the Office 365 (and now CRM Online) Service Health dashboard will tell you what’s going on with the service right now and what maintenance breaks are planned. Compared to, say, trust.salesforce.com, it’s less transparent due to the requirement of having an administrator login to access the information, but it’s a good start.

What if you’ve already implemented CRM Online and want to take advantage of the integration with Office 365 user accounts or on-premises AD? At the moment, there’s not much you can do. The changes introduced on July 19th only apply to new CRM Online organizations, which will now be provisioned onto the Online Services Delivery Platform (OSDP). Existing organizations on the old Commerce Transaction Platform (CTP) will eventually be migrated, but there is no official schedule for this yet.

My guess would be that we’re not going to see any updates for existing CRM Online customers until the Office 2013 wave of updates rolls out to Office 365 customers, as Microsoft will surely put all its resources behind ensuring the Windows 8 launch with the accompanying business apps is a success. With plenty of other things on the Dynamics CRM development roadmap, it may take another year before we can finally say goodbye to the Windows Live ID based authentication in CRM Online. In the meantime, why not sign up for an Office 365 Enterprise Preview to see what the 2013 wave has to offer on SharePoint, Office and other products?

Edit 2012-07-31: here’s a list of a few Office 365 issues that can cause problems for new CRM Online organizations:

  • Setting an integration user account to Non-Interactive access mode doesn’t reduce the count of assigned CRM licenses in MOP, as there are no free service accounts on Office 365 at the moment. In the past CRM Online allowed 5 free non-interactive user accounts. This is no longer the case, so any integrated application with its dedicated credentials will consume a full license on CRM Online. Unless this policy changes, it will increase the license cost for existing customers when they are eventually migrated from CTP to the new OSDP environment.
  • Developer toolkit and plugin registration tool cannot connect to CRM Online, default discovery service URL has changed from dev.crm.dynamics.com to disco.crm.dynamics.com (see thread on CRM forum)
  • Internet Lead Capture functionality is currently unavailable for new organizations in US (other regions have never had this functionality to begin with)
  • Instead of *.live.com, now you’ll need to add *.microsoftonline.com and *.accesscontrol.windows.net into IE Trusted Sites alongside *.dynamics.com to avoid prompts during the authentication process

CRM adventures in Azure: changing the virtual machine size

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Posted on 6th July 2012 by Jukka Niiranen in Tips

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After having managed to overcome my previous challenges of deploying SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services on a virtual machine running in Windows Azure, I was well underway in configuring my Dynamics CRM environment to contain the tools and data needed for developing, testing and even demonstrating custom solutions right in the Microsoft cloud.

I had started off with a medium size virtual machine that had 2 CPU cores and 3.5 GB memory. While I’ve been able to successfully use CRM 2011 + SQL 2012 on such a setup as a personal development box, I have to say it’s not exactly the fastest thing around. With me being the only person working with the environment currently, it wouldn’t have been such a big issue, but upon trying to import one 5 MB solution file into a CRM organization I started running into timeout issues, leading to the following message:

It’s not very uncommon to experience timeouts with CRM when working with large solution files. There are various settings that you can modify to overcome this issue, including the OLEDBTimeout, Web.Config parameters etc. However, I wasn’t having success with the solution import regardless of having applied the registry and settings changes, so I thought why not crank it up a bit and give my virtual machine some more resources. After all, isn’t that one of the selling points of on-demand cloud computing? If you need more power, just adjust the lever and consume the resources as you see fit.

I proceeded with shutting down my virtual machine from Windows and going to the Azure management portal. After finally getting the portal to confirm that the machine was in a stopped state, I changed the virtual machine size from medium to large (4 cores, 7 GB). Great, now let’s fire it up once again by clicking on Restart and… it doesn’t start. Trying it again and still the only result I get is the following notification in hte Azure portal:

The virtual machine cannot restart. The current virtual machine state is RoleStateUnknown.

Ok, I’ll wait a while, I thought to myself. After a few minutes and some more clicks on the Restart button I was starting to get a bit anxious on why my server wasn’t booting up. I started googling for the error message and discovered a discussion thread that indicated I wasn’t the only person in the world suffering from this problem. The RoleStateUnknown message appears to be a known issue that the Windows Azure team will be fixing by the time the Preview phase is over, but for the time being, this is something you can expect to happen if you power off a virtual machine in Azure on a bad day. If the error message does not go away, the only workaround you have is to create a new copy of your virtual machine.

While there are ways to do the process through PowerShell to export & import the virtual machine, I decided to take the GUI route and just click on the Delete button on my virtual machine. I must admit that particular action doesn’t feel quite right, deleting the very server you’re trying to get back up, but in this context it’s actually not as catastrophic or irreversible as it sounds at first. You see, the server really is just a VHD disk that has been assigned the hardware, IP and other pieces that make it operational. It’s also worth noting that this is the way how you can stop incurring costs from your virtual machine. If you just shut down your VM, you will still be charged for it, but if you delete the server, you’ll have an image available that you can later on use for creating a new server.

After deleting the server, I created a new one with the same configuration. OK, not exactly the same, as both the [servername].cloudapp.net DNS entry and the IP address will change in the process. Also do note that the remote desktop port will be different, so only updating the server name in your RDP settings won’t allow you to connect, as I quickly discovered after clicking on Restart.

Oh yeah, I had that extra F-drive on my machine, too! Better remember to attach that disk as well, since that’s where my CRM databases are located. I hit a restart on the SQL Server service, but noticed that the databases still weren’t available. Then I remembered what Shan McArthur had accidentally demonstrated in his Windows Azure 2012 Spring Wave webinar session on XRMvirtual earlier this week. Although the D-drive on an Azure virtual machine is great for storing temporary data that doesn’t need to be consuming that precious C-drive, the fact that the D-drive is only a temporary storage means also that any directory which you create on that disk will not be available once you spin up a new virtual machine from the same VHD. A quick peek into the Windows application log confirmed that this was what was keeping my SQL Server from starting up, as it wasn’t able to locate or create Temp DB and log it needed.

“FCB::Open failed: Could not open file D:\SQL\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Data\tempdb.mdf for file number 1.  OS error: 3(The system cannot find the path specified.).” There we go, that was the path that was missing from my D-drive. In a default configuration the temporary database would have been under C:\Program Files, but I had put it on D:\SQL instead, so I needed to manually go and create the folder. After this my virtual machine was again able to run CRM the way that is was meant to be. I’m sure there’s a PowerShell script sample out there somewhere for those who wish to automate the directory existence verification and creation upon restart of their servers, but this shouldn’t be a too frequent problem unless you go deleting your Azure virtual machines on a regular basis, so I didn’t bother looking up one right now. The main thing for me was I had my CRM test server running now on double the capacity.

As a side note, once I opened up Excel, I was greeted by this Microsoft Office Activation Wizard. I guess that proves that it’s now really a whole different machine I’m working on, even though I booted up from the same VHD that I had already activated on the previous day. Hardware based license management feels a bit funny when operating in such an intangible environment as Azure, but that’s how it is…

Finally, let’s get back to the topic mentioned in the title of this blog post: What is the right way to change the size of your Windows Azure virtual machine? It turns out that you can actually do this right from the Azure management portal without shutting down your server. That’s what it says on the Azure community pages:

NOTE: If you are attempting to just change the size of your Virtual Machine, you can do this without stopping the Virtual Machine. You can go into the ”Configure” tab on the virtual machine in the management portal and select the Virtual Machine size. This will change the size without first stopping, which will allow you to avoid this issue in this scenario.

Will be interesting to see how the Windows server will cope with disappearing CPU cores and memory if I decide to go back from Large to Medium, but I’ll leave that experiment to the next time. Now let’s see if I could get that solution file imported first…

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