December 2005 - Posts
I have a customer who is very interested in moving from GoldMine to CRM. However, he is finding the upfront cost of the software a little daunting, especially since he will also need to upgrade his Small Business Server as well. I mentioned to him that I had heard that there might be financing available through Microsoft so he could spread his payments over time. He told me that that could be the Deal Maker and asked me to check it out.
Well, trying to traverse the Microsoft licensing maze is often a daunting and confusing task in itself. I tried having a look at the pricing info at Tech Data, my national distributor. There were hundreds of choices! I finally narrowed it down to a couple of pages. What I did glean from that was that with Open Value (?) and Software Assurance, payments could be spread over three annual payments easing the initial outlay. And with that comes all the bennies of Software Assurance. That sounded pretty good. Then I had a look at the slides I'd saved from the partner webinar on December 1st, "CRM 3.0 Pricing and Licensing". Here they noted that CRM was available for a monthly payment of between $14 and $16 per user per month over a 36 month payment term. That sounds pretty good. But trying to find that has still be elusive. Finally I e-mailed the Microsoft Dynamics Partner Resource Desk, mbsprtnr@microsoft.com, with my specific situation. Hopefully they'll be able to quickly resolve my dilemma. When they do, I'll report back here what I learned. Having a monthly option will make selling CRM a lot easier, especially to the small business community.
CRM 3.0 comes with some neat new reports. (Reports in CRM 1.2 weren't so neat, IMHO.) One that caught my eye is the Account Overview. This report which you can run for up to 10 accounts at a time gives a great summary of all (or at least most) of the areas within CRM. It includes a Basic Profile section which includes such info as Parent Company, Relationship (i.e. Customer, Prospect, etc.), Location, Ownership, Stock Symbol, and so on. The Primary Contact section gives the pertinent info on how to contact the main guy including phone numbers and e-mail. The Opportunity Summary gives an overview of the opportunities associated with this account, the probabilities of each, and so on. The Support Summary section gives a quick look at cases that have been opened (and closed) with this account and what their satisfaction was.
Other sections include Additional Contacts, Relationships, Recent Notes, Recent Interactions, Upcoming Meetings, and Upcoming Activities. I think this is a great tool for the primary Account Manager, the Sales or Customer Service Managers, etc. that gives a great overview of the entire account. If you are running CRM 3.0, I urge you to check this report out. There are many more new features and reports in CRM 3.0. I'll try to highlight them in this blog.
In a previous post,
Sometimes a Smart Host Isn't So Smart, I noted some advantages of perhaps not using a smart host (where you have your Exchange server send messages via your ISP rather than directly to the intended recepient's mail server). In general, I prefer to send direct, and I'm sure my ISP appreciates the lessening of load on their server (if they knew). But I am finding that more and more addresses I want to send to, reject my e-mails with a 550 error which indicates they are rejecting my messages. The reason they are rejecting me (I think I'm gonna cry) is that I have a dynamic IP address (it's cheaper) instead of a static one. This is a SPAM rejection thing. I use DYNDNS to handle my DNS. But some mail servers object and won't accept my messages. These servers (domains actually) I add to the Address Space of the connector I've created to send certain messages to my smart host. My list grows but I still like being able to send direct when possible.
The other day I had a client call me worried that an important e-mail he'd sent out to several hundred of his clients using GoldMine hadn't been delivered and would I check it out. I had a look. GoldMine showed that the message had been sent to all. There was nothing in the queues anywhere. As best I could tell, it had been sent. My client checked with his recepients. Nope, they'd not received it. I suggested he try sending it once again (I've had problems on occassion with GoldMine not sending as it should). Same thing. Nothing in queues, messages showing in GoldMine logs, recepients getting nothing. He tried sending it to me. Nope, nothing. Then it struck me to look at his spam filter. He uses Trend Micro Client/Server/Messaging for SMB which has a bit of a spam filter as well. Sure enough, there were all his important messages! Tried a few settings and finally turned off the spam filter feature on Trend. We tested by sending the message to me. Nothing. However, it was not trapped in his spam filter! A check of my Trend Micro spam filter found the message. So, it had gotten out of his machine but was trapped by mine. Obviously there was something in his message that Trend did not like. I had a look at it. He had several bullets in the message that were underlined and ended with an asteriks (*). There was nothing else I could see in the message, no bad words, no obvious flag words like FREE FREE FREE. But the asteriks looked a little suspect. I suggested these to my client. He removed them and tried again. BAM! There it was in my inbox. Apparently the *s were the culprit. He went ahead and sent the (modified) message to his clients and as far as I know (and he'd tell me) all went well. So, in these days of spam, watch you *s when composing e- mail.
Today Microsoft held probably its last SQL 2005/VS 2005/BizTalk 2006 Launch here is sunny San Antonio. The event seemed to be well attended for a last minute affair. Along with the launch, the Microsoft Across America truck was here. This is the first time I've had an opportunity to see the truck. It is loaded with all sorts of demos of the Microsoft products and staffed by a knowledgeable Microsoft technology specialist.. Today they were giving demos on SBS 2003, CRM 3.0, SQL 2005, and Visual Studio 2005. Our local IAMCP chapter was responsible for getting the truck to come here and handled the reservations for demos. All IAMCP members were encouraged to bring their customer. Unfortunatley few did. I think I was actually the only one. I had a private showiing for 5 of my clients which lasted about an hour. They were given a very good overview of CRM 3.0 and allowed to ask the questions that pertained to their needs. I was in a position to respond as well and to lead the discussion in the direction I felt appropriate for my clients.
Should you have the opportunity to reserver the truck, be sure to do so. It is a great way to impress your clients and show off Microsoft technology.
I have been writing articles on Windows NT, Windows 200x, and Small Business Server for a number of years. Most are published in the Alamo PC Organization's magazine,
The PC Alamode.
Harry Brelsford has been kind enough to publish some as well. And I also save them on my own web site,
www.LentzComputer.net. Some times I actually write some useful stuff! And sometimes I need to revisit those articles to remind myself of what I did to resolve a particular issue, or a variation on it. Having them on my local SharePoint web site allows me do to a quick search on some word I think might be in an article. This then produces a very quick response with all items that hold that word or words. For instance, when I was testing the CRM 3.0 beta install on my VPC, I set up CRM 1.2 first. Since my production CRM uses unique IP addresses to differentiate between web sites, I did the same on my test VPC. However, there are a few tricks to make it work. Being an old man, my poor old memory doesn't go much past this morning sometimes so I didn't remember what exactly I had done. But I did remember it had something to do with 'httpcfg'. So I went to my web page and searched on httpcfg. Sure enough it listed the very article I needed,
0501 Lentz Configuring Multiple Web Sites with SBS 2003.rtf. Re-reading my own article refreshed my failing memory and allowed me to finish setting up my test environment. I invite you to play with it a little and go to my web site,
http://www.LentzComputer.net and enter something in the search box in the upper right corner and see what happens.
Well, the actual upgrade to CRM 3.0 seemed to go well. It took HOURS to complete, but that may be because of the VPC environment. After the install, it required a reboot. Unlike with the 'clean' install, after the reboot I wasn't immediately taken to the configuration wizard although an icon for it was placed on the desktop. Running the configuration wizard produced an error. Don't know if it was because of my configuration or not. I suspect it's because my system was already configured by virtue of having been an upgrade from CRM 1.2.
Now I'll play with the beta a bit and wait for the 'real' thing to arrive in my Action Pack.
Getting past the SQL Server Reporting Services required the same fix that it did when installing a clean CRM. Essentially removing the loopback address, 127.0.0.1 from the default web site and adding a adding a DisableLoopbackCheck value to the registry. See my earlier blog on the subject. I had thought that perhaps since my CRM 1.2 web site was not the default site (it's on a different IP address), I wouldn't need to remove the 127.0.0.1 address. Wrong. Eventhough it was not on the actually CRM web site, I still needed to remove it from the default web site. I'll have to replace it later, or duck Susan's 2x4.
The next error took a bit more digging. Basically I had to find and run a script that uses adsutil.vbs to set the NT Authentication Provider to Negotiale,NTLM. I found this in Microsoft KB 215383. My need to resolve this may be unique to my situation as I had to run a similar script when I was trying to get CRM 1.2 to work. To do that, I had to set NT Authentication to NTLM. That may have messed things up requiring my 'undoing' it for the upgrade. Anyway, I am through the Systems Requirement. Now on to finish, hopefully, my upgrade!
Well, I'm running the CRM 3.0 install on top of my existing CRM 1.2 I have just started but have had to enter the Product ID code for the SBS product and accept the EULA. Now I'm being told that Microsoft Application Error Reporting and MSXML 4.0 Hotfix are missing and there is an Install button available. I wonder why the Upgrade Advisor didn't mention this. I guess because the install will fix it for me.
Ah! Now I'm given a screen, Upgrade to Microsoft CRM 3.0, that recognizes that I have a 'previous version' of CRM and tells me we're going to upgrade. That's what I was hoping for.
Now I'm given an opportunity to backup any Crystal Reports I may have. Don't have any so I'm selecting No and moving on.
Next step is to specify Reporting Services server. I can install a New Reporting Services server or connect to an existing one. Since I don't have an existing one, guess I'll go with installing a new one. I also have the option to use SSL. I'll pass this time. If I do this test again, I'll select it.
Specifying the Security Account is the next step. I didn't set up any domain accounts for my test system but in my productions system, I do use domain accounts for the services. I'll use the Network Service Account which is the default.
Next I specify the Exchange server, no real surprises here.
Now surprises. Running the Systems Requirements, this is where the clean install always failed. It does so again, but with a new reason. In addition to the problems with the SQL Server Reporting Services that we encountered in the clean install, I've now got one on IIS say The Web site's NTAuthentication Providers must be Negotiate,NTLM. Think I can solve the SQL SRS issue the same way as before. Will need to do a little research to solve the NTLM issue.
See you later.
Well, I've gotten CRM 1.2 installed. I won't go through the trials and tribulations on all that since at this point we need to concentrate on CRM 3.0. I just ran the CRM Upgrade Advisor and was pleasantly surprised to find that it came up clean. So, now on to doing the upgrade. Here we go!
Well, tonight I bit the bullet, after a little nostalgic play, and blew away my CRM 3.0 test VPC. Now I start off to build my upgrade environment. Because I'm using a VPC with undo disks, I was able to restart back with my SBS 2003 install, before CRM, so I don't have to go through all that work. Now I need to install CRM 1.2 similar to how I have it on my production system. Basically what that entails is building a CRM web site which I will put on a different IP address. I'll use 192.168.x 3 like I have in my production server. I'll create a DNS entry to point CRM to that address so when I enter CRM in my browser, it will bring it up. Then I'll install 1.2 and tell it to use that web site instead of the default web site. CRM 1.2 was not designed for SBS and when you install it using the defaults, it kinda wipes out a lot of stuff. Thus one must create a CRM web site for it to use instead.
Stay tuned for this next phase in the soga.
CRM 3.0 is now available for end user purchase! I just finished a webcast on licensing and pricing. The Small Business Server version is basically $599 (or less) for the server and $499 (or less) for each user. The link to the webcast was
http://www.msreadiness.com/attendeeregister.asp?eid=3457&rid=197667 The recording should be availabe in a few hours. If you are a Microsoft partner and interested in CRM 3.0, you should watch the webcast.