• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webtopics/archive/2009/01/19/service-principal-name-spn-checklist-for-kerberos-authentication-with-iis-7-0.aspx
• http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/regcont/en_us/op/articles/configurespn.aspx#o45872
• http://blog.sonomapartners.com/2007/04/kerberos_and_de.html

The duration of the appointment is invalid

If you need to change the maximum value you are able to do this directly in the database (which is officially supported – quote of a support ticket below).

• There is no way to modify the limit for service duration via UI. We will read this value from a SQL table and there we can change the default setting.

  Database: [Organization]_MSCRM

  Table: OrganizationBase

  Field: MaxAppointmentDurationDays

  Default value: 10

• If you overwrite this value with the needed one (for example 20) and after that perform an IISReset, the known error message (“The duration of the appointment is invalid”) will no longer occur.

  This change is the recommended solution from Microsoft CRM Support and will be supported.

• Background: This field does come originally from CRM 3.0, where customer already provided feedback that the maximum duration of 10 days does not meet their need. The solution for CRM 3.0 was a solution implementation via registry key: Navigate to the following registry hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM. Create a registry key of type DWORD and name it “SchedulingEngine.MaxAppointmentDurationDays”. Provide a reasonable digit greater than 10 representing the number of days the service activity would be kept open and insure that the value is set to Decimal and not Hexadecimal. Now you can schedule an appointment with a duration value of more than 10 days.
• For CRM 4.0 you will need a manual change of the according OrganisationBase entry. Exception: If you upgrade your CRM installation from CRM 3.0 to CRM4.0, the value will be automatically carried over

Another possibility to adjust this setting is to change the organization.maxappointmentdurationdays Property via the sdk.

Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Exchange.GenerateEncryptionKeyAction failed.

Method not found: ‘Boolean Microsoft.Crm.ApplicationConfig.IsFederalInformationProcessingCompliant()’.

The cause of this error was a pending restart which was requested by Windows Update. I have no clue if a specific update was the cause of the problem, or the system state itself.
However, after rebooting the machine, the error went away and the setup was successful.

So keep in mind, if the pre-checks warns you about a pending reboot, it is sometimes better not to ignore this hint

You have to enable the optimized import process by adding the DWORD key OptimizeOrgImport with value 1 to the registry hive of Dynamics CRM (see the detailed description http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977867)

Recently, I had a problem during an import of an organization which failed with following error

Message: Exception during import of organization (Name=’‘, Id=3e58a0cc-c277-df11-b2c1-0050569473db):
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: A row with a duplicate key cannot be added to the object ‘dbo.SystemUserOrganizations’-object with unique index ‘SystemUserOrganizations_CrmUserId’

The organization which I tried to import was a backup of an organization which was created in the same deployment. The import runs successful on every other deployment. With help of the Microsoft Support, we identified the cause of the issue: the OptimizeOrgImport key.

The knowledgebase article for OptimizeOrgImport contains following passage:

When you use the registry entry OptimizeOrgImport and have the value of this entry set to 1, you cannot import the same organization database more than one time.
If you want to import the same organization database more than one time, you must do one of the following things:

• Set OptimizeOrgImport = 0 and use the normal import process.
• Delete the organization, and then import the organization again.

This passage is a little bit misleading, as the optimized import process fails already at the first time, if the organization was created in the same deployment. In order to import a backup of an organization into the originating deployment, you have to deactivate OptimizeOrgImport.

However, Dynamics CRM allows you to create your own id for a record. The primary key of a record is stored in its Key-Property. On all default entities, for example account, the id property is marked as Valid for create (see accountid). This means, the sdk allows you to pass your own id.

using System;
using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk;
 
namespace PreCreateKeyPlugin
{
    public class PreCreateKeyPlugin : IPlugin
    {
        public void Execute(IPluginExecutionContext context)
        {
            if (IsPreCreate(context))
            {
                if (context.InputParameters.Contains(ParameterName.Target))
                {
                    DynamicEntity target = context.InputParameters[ParameterName.Target] as DynamicEntity;
 
                    if (target != null)
                    {
                        Guid customId = new Guid("{d7256b93-a5b5-45f9-9f2d-a1838279c35c}");
 
                        target["accountid"] = new Key(customId);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
 
        private bool IsPreCreate(IPluginExecutionContext context)
        {
            return  context.MessageName == MessageName.Create && 
                    context.Stage == MessageProcessingStage.BeforeMainOperationOutsideTransaction;
        }
    }
}

If you register this plugin for pre-create on the account entity and create a new account, it will have the provided id.

Please keep in mind, that you are in the responsibility to assign an new GUID for every execution of this plugin, but this should be clear when working with primary keys.

function GetFieldLabel(fieldname)
{
  var field = crmForm.all[fieldname+ '_c'];
 
  if (field != null){
    return field.firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
  }
  else {
    return '';
  }
}
 
alert(GetFieldLabel('subject'));

The other option is, to retrieve the label for the user language from the crm service. I will cover this in another article.

For example, if you integrate a web application with an IFrame, you have to set different addresses for internal and external access. Or, if the application is only accessible from inside your network, you can show a message that it is not available for external users.

With help of Form Scripting you can detect an external request with little effort. You can make use of the function prependOrgName(”) which adds the organization prefix to the argument, if it is necessary. That means for an external request, it returns always the argument which you have passed.

function IsExternalRequest() 
{
  var ifdTestValue = prependOrgName('');
  var isIFDCall = ifdTestValue == '';
 
  return isIFDCall;
}

Calling IsExternalRequest will return true, if the request comes from an external network range. You could also define this function globally in the form context (see also http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=JS5)

IsExternalRequest = function() 
{
  var ifdTestValue = prependOrgName('');
  var isIFDCall = ifdTestValue == '';
 
  return isIFDCall;
}

With large organizations, the most likely problem is that the import process runs into a timeout when it updates the user mapping. Update Rollup 8 contains a fix for this problem which has to be enabled manually. See http://xrm.ascentium.com/blog/crm/Post768.aspx.

Another common issue is that the import fails with the following error

ExecuteNonQuery requires an open and available Connection. The connection’s current state is closed.

This error is likely caused by an issue in the .NET 2 Framework. See this article of the EMEA CRM Support team for a description
http://blogs.msdn.com/emeadcrmsupport/archive/2009/10/12/error-while-importing-an-organization-executenonquery-requires-an-open-and-available-connection.aspx

Another cause of this issue are reports which could not be published to the report server by any reason. For example, reports which are spiced up with custom assemblies cannot be published without the referenced assemblies. The import will fail when it tries to publish such a report. In this case enable the tracing, which generates a trace file for the mmc-console. With help of this file you can identify the report which is making problems. To solve the issue, you can either delete it directly from the database (unsupported) or you delete it prior to the backup of the originating system. After the successful import, you can import the problematic report again.

See this thread in the CRM Deployment forum for further description http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/crmdeployment/thread/1336bb5d-a119-44e3-83dd-1f557edccc31

In order to look whether there are pending or failed mails in your system, you can use following search. As you can see, it is based on the existing view ‘My pending E-mails’. You simply have to remove the ‘Owner = current user’ condition.

If the result of this search contains mails which are in pending state since ages or have failed to send, it’s debugging time again. If you are using the Outlook Client for sending the mail, then take a look at http://blogs.msdn.com/emeadcrmsupport/archive/2009/12/18/how-to-activate-crm-4-0-platform-tracing-on-server-client-and-e-mail-router.aspx for a description on enabling the tracing.

The debugging on the E-Mail Router side is a little bit more complex, but it is explained in detail in this article http://blogs.msdn.com/benlec/archive/2008/03/25/how-to-implement-logging-for-the-microsoft-crm-4-0-e-mail-connector.aspx

System.InvalidOperationException: ExecuteNonQuery requires the command to have a transaction when the connection assigned to the command is in a pending local transaction. The Transaction property of the command has not been initialized.

The solution of this problem was quite simple (after the reason was found). The application pool of the system had insufficient rights for the organization database.

To get the system up and running again you have to

1. Identify the identity of the application pool
2. Ensure the app pool idenity has a sql user assigned for the organization database
3. Grant the app pool identity the right db_owner on the organization database
4. Restart IIS