Fun and games

I am still using CRM 1.2 in my business because all the horror stories of upgrades from 1.2 to 3.0 around and about. Reading Larry Lentz's blog at http://ts2community.com/blogs/larrylentz/default.aspx is enough to turn your hair grey

So I decided to install CRM 3.0 on a VS image of SBS2003 PE SP1 that I have here. NB I don't have ISA2004 installed

My standard way of setting an SBS box up is to have the domain name as domainname.local and then when I run the CEICW to give the machine name as server.domainname.co.uk. This means that it works when somone wants to use RWW and you can update the external DNS for your domain to point to the external IP address of your server.

So what did I have to do to get CRM 3.0 installed on SBS2003?

1. Setup a forward lookup zone for domainname.co.uk in the SBS server DNS and create an A record for server.domainame.co.uk pointing to the internal IP address of the SBS server.
   
2. Fix the loopback problem as outlined in this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;896861
   
3. I then installed CRM. It failed with some bizarre error to do with Reporting Services which was displayed in raw HTML in a dialog box that was so big it didn't fit on the screen even when set to the highest resolution my monitor would go to. Come on CRM folk at Microsoft you should be able to do better than that.
   
4. A bit of digging around led me to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/887787/en-us and running this allowed me to get Report Services up and running.
   
5. I then re-ran the CRM setup and chose to repair the install. Installation then completed successfully

This experience has not filled me with confidence that the upgrade to CRM 3.0 from 1.2 on our production server will go well We already use Reporting Services and I just hope that the CRM 3.0 install doesn't throw a total wobbly when it finds it already installed! The CRM install seemed to go fairly smoothly, it was the Reporting Services install that gave me all the grief. One great thing about Virtual Server is you can create the server again as quickly as you can copy the files across.......