Today I was trying to run a legacy application which was used by our team to create new leads in CRM from a website. however every time I send a request I returned me with lot of errors I tried every possibility however no success and I was getting following message.
0x80040216 An unexpected error occurred. Platform
upon further investigation I come to a point where I got following error
System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (2007) Web service endpoint is not supported in this release
this error lead me to a situation where I found the resolution of my problem., actually
The 2007 service endpoint was deprecated in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 release. Extensions that use the 2007 endpoint will not be supported and will not work in the next major release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Note the following more detailed information:
During a deployment for a client today of a custom ASP.NET application, IIS 7 refused to render external css files correctly - just spitting out Error 500 or blank content. This happens because IIS 7 and 7.5 do NOT render static content by default - which is a little surprising but not completely unexpected.
To fix for Windows Server 2008:
I personally believe voters are those stupid whole believe that they can defeat king makers. As usual people were standing in lanes and votes were automatically in ballet boxes. No doubt in Lahore PMLN is the strongest party but this is not the way. Since a student of a geo politics I have a strong opinion that decision are made somewhere else. They need PMLN in Pakistan just to support war on terrorism and they don’t want any hiccups for their exist in Afghanistan. I am writing these lines because things were really depressing we are a nation who is inherently corrupt so honestly we don’t true people. So for new government things will not be so easy because Pakistan is like a car who needs engine level overhauling which requires money so what will happen is that new government will increase the Taxes or in long run and go for IMF in short run. Resulting both a rise in dollar my prediction is that dollar will reach around 108-110 in first year, as usual PMLN government will try to seek help of shah Abdullah for oil to start generation of electricity but for other expense they will highly dependent on new loans. As a prediction Ishaq dar will be the new minister of treasury. In my opinion the new government will not last more than 3 or 3 ½ year because once US will be out of Afghanistan they will leave support of Pakistan and in these 3 years people will be more frustrated due to and they ll be fed-up resulting in change. On the other hand I suspect that khan wouldn’t last till that time. because this nation does not deserve a true leader. I am not a supporter of IK but I believe must give him a chance but again I am just piece of paper which can be thrown out of ballet box.
things will not settle down for this country each passing day thing will become bad to worse because the preferences are not the recovery of sick economy or growth rate and no body has time to do that.
following things will happen as per my calculate.
these are just small calculation I am not an analysis just an observer. but the again strings get motion from the shadows and no doubt voters are those stupid whole believe that they can defeat king makers
Recently I have been working to start and activity related to virtualization of a live CRM server and then create its replica to initiate the activity of internet facing deployment. things are still out of my hand I am trying to share as much knowledge I can during the course of activities. First of all I would recommend not to change name of CRM server machine because if you change the name you have to change the SQL server instance Name use Drop Server and Add Server command I share in a pervious post. then you have to reinstall CRM server 2011 and if your machine have traces of previous version of CRM server. it just goofs up. it does not register any of the assembly that is supposed to be registered by installer. so following are some steps I have done so far and by this time I have bee able to see the interface CRM server.
now I am going to install Rollups, on the same token I have created a new machine for ADFS deployment, on that machine I have configured IIS and installed SQL Server 2008 R2. I will try to keep updated everyone.
I was in middle of the installation and system was throwing exception that instance name must be same as of machine name. so I had to update the instance name of SQL server. following is a script I found online and it was really helpful.
USE master
GO
---- Fetch the SQL Server instance name - fetch the value of "name" from the output
--sp_helpserver
--GO
-- Drop the old server registration
sp_dropserver 'WIN2K8\SQL2K12','droplogins'
GO
-- Register the new server with the new name
sp_addserver 'CONTOSSSO\SQL2K12',local
GO
Source
Recently installed new Windows 7.0 professional edition and now whenever I try to remote desktop it’s throws error like following
An authentication error has occurred.
The requested security package does not exist
so I had to search on google an I found that the problem is due to some missing parameters in the Registry.
Apparently one of the sys admins deployed an sms package that removed some settings from this key:
HKLM\system\currentcontrolset\control\lsa\security packages
It should have these values: kerberos msv1_0 schannel wdigest tspkg pku2u
The tskpkg and pku2u values were missing.
After adding them and rebooting and I can RDP to 2008 servers.
today I found that one of our BizTalk Servers are creating problems when access upon investigation I found that BiztalkTalkMdmtDb is in suspect status. to resolve this issue I did following things which are mentioned over the internet.
EXEC sp_resetstatus 'BizTalkMgmtDb'
ALTER DATABASE BizTalkMgmtDb SET EMERGENCY
DBCC checkdb(' BizTalkMgmtDb ')
ALTER DATABASE BizTalkMgmtDb SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
DBCC CheckDB ('BizTalkMgmtDb', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)
ALTER DATABASE BizTalkMgmtDb SET MULTI_USER
I have an MSSQL 2008 R2 installation and was trying to attach a DB from a non-R2 installation using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and I was getting the following error:
CREATE FILE encountered operating system error 5(Access is denied.) while attempting to open or create the physical file 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\MyDataBase.mdf'. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 5123)
Found plenty of Google results pointing me to suggestions about SQL Server 2000 and 2005 with instructions on how to add user permissions and which user account needed to be added.
Turned out that all I needed to do was to run SSMS as an administrator and the attach worked.
1. Verbal communication including how to greet, explain and react to clients on different phase like in analysis, deployment and UAT
2. written Communication, including emails and status reports
3. Identification and escalation of changes and change requests.
4. how to keep live and follow-ups a thread, notification and problem escalation
5. Management involvement or issue escalation techniques, i mean when to induct top layer in a mail loop. I mean no need to include senior management in every email until there is really a need, to provide them bandwidth for other horizons to work upon.
6. How to remain disciplined in front of client, I mean if there is a high priority issue or problem everybody is jumping in to resolve that. Rather let Client Liaison/Project manager to resolve it
7. Escalation of Project variance and deadline to all stakeholders
8. How to be proactive rather reactive in client communication.
9. How to keep your primary contact relax and happy even if project is in trouble.
10. Increase the project’s perceived importance in your and your Client’s field of vision.
11. Reduce the temptation to delay something on that project for the sake of another as you’ll have to report on progress in less than a week, e.g. schedule and budget updates.
12. Allow for a constant flow of review and decision making at regular intervals, hence making planning easier.
13. Rapidly encourage a good working rapport with a client making things easier for both sides.
14. Avoid dealing with ad hoc requests the minute they come in, often they’re not as urgent as they seem.
15. Have a consistent project folder structure and file naming convention.
16. Follow consistent processes, so you get better at estimating how long similar tasks in the future will take: e.g. creating a proposal or functional specifications which are dependent on size of the project.
1. plan your daily activities, Build a crude time schedule for what you are planning to today, document it somewhere where it remains in focus.
2. document your meetings and publish meeting notes and action items
3. Keep your surrounding quite so that you are not causing disturbance for others, conference room is best place for meeting do not start taking in dev. hall until mandatory. use outside corridor for gossips and chitchats.
4. document and implement your ideas, because innovation is an outcome of creative ideas
5. be consistent, achieve your timelines or share the change of action
6. better to arrive on time, delayed arrival should have reason.
7. distribute your workload when required so that everyone feels himself as part of team.
8. be motivated, share whatever you want with management for catharsis
9. document all non-billable activities to keep a complete picture of your utilization
10. Take responsibility for the direction of your career. Ultimately you are responsible for creating an environment in which you can learn and grow. The longer you stay on a “dead-end” career path, the harder it will be to stay positive. If you are not happy with the current directions of your career, communicate that to your manager if you wish to stay with the company; otherwise, look for another job that you feel is a better match.
11. avoid distractions, noisy and congested work environment make it impossible to communicate with clients and concentrate on work, if you feel your surrounding are not bearable kindly inform HR.
12. Block websites, If you find yourself to be one of those people who can easily get distracted and spend lots of time on the web looking at anything but your work, then you may need some restraint. Getting a child website blocker or even some post-it reminders might help you stay focused and save those sites for your coffee break. Look online for some good, free open-source website blockers if you think it’ll help you get stuff done.
13. draw a simple road map before doing a code or QA, including what is to be done and how, I still do that and it helps me remembering reusability.
14. do not dive in and lost in code, try to reach on surface often to have a holistic view of the problem space.
15. and at last but not least work smartly, remember what you have done previously and how it can be utilized again and again.
Recently many of our users were reporting that when they modify or change any of CRM email template it start flickering or Internet explorer Crashes. upon investigation I observed that it is happening to only those templates where we have mentioned company’s phone number. upon further drilldown of problem I concluded that it is happening due to Microsoft Lync Add-on of internet explorer, lynch add-on somehow injecting some HTML which is causing template to flicker horizontally and vertically. because when I disabled this Add-on everything started working as expected.
In my previous post I tried to shed some light on the issues which are very much required by top management level, in my current post I will try to highlight areas which are missing by second layer of management or we can say the engine part of the an organization, often neglected or always considered as working properly. However an issue at this level result in low productivity and often work stress and low commitment and dedication level.
Define yourself:
Organization evolving from scratch to mid-level always has this phenomenon especially if technically skilled people are elevated from lower level or organization foundations are built by techiest. The problem is people with highest paid amount of salary and benefits’ always jump in to technical problem and in client support. It’s always good to be part of team but if you really don’t know who will carries the ball to the goal post then ultimately team will suffer. For mid-level manager it is very important that they always focus on Ariel view of the company and surroundings, this will help them to not only equip with latest trends but they will help to get more business which is the ultimate job of these people. Ordinary things can be done by the ordinary people and but if highly position people will start client support and analysis and design part then who will search for new venues and business. So ideally people should act what they are asked to do like VPs should focus on business developments, technical directors should focus on overall growth and project scopes overall performance, work environments and productivity measurements, Architects should focus of project design and performances. Because we will not do what we have to do then we all will mess up like those who are not in business now.
People are not doing what they have to do rather they are doing what they love to do.
Ready to relocate:
When we start doing something we develop a learning curve human nature always resistant to learn new things because it’s difficult and it required a dedication. So change is an ultimate requirement of any IT organization. However it is always observed that people are reluctant to learn new things or they learn it through the hard way. In progressive organization people working in a team are like fire fighters they do what is required to do but once things are under control they start practicing their job descriptions.
Analyze and document:
One of major problem in growing IT organizations where there are lack of documented processes that people are not ready to document about requirements. A non-documented project can have a huge variance because the changing requirements from the client. To reduce rework and enhance profitability is must that each client requirement and change should be documented and approved the client to keep all stakeholders at same page.
Work Planning and WBS:
Make sure that each team and its member have a clear set of requirements and work break down structure. Vague WBS and lack of planning at work level can take effort to 60% above the required level.
Quantitative Estimates:
do not perform guesstimates on any project or even on a single functional points, define objectively the complexity, effort, time to spend by dev, QA and project management. search google for such templates.
Rework and information Gathering:
People doing multiple things at the same time or multi-tasking of senior members of organization is one of the major problem areas. Human mind can work on many things simultaneously but can focus on one at a time. It is always better that team which is supposedly working on project have direction communication with client and they gather it properly. Once signed and approved it will help to reduce rework effort.
Micro management and extended meetings:
People at any level of organization do not like baby sitting or micro management. For organization of IT, it has more serious impact on productivity due to intuitive nature of work. People often get frustrated and their working abilities may reduce if they are continuously monitored or managed. Ideally a project team should be autonomous in its decision because they are responsible for it. Similarly it’s always good to discussed serious issues but long and extended meetings always have serious negative impact on overall productivity. If a company is paying 100$ per hour to a group of senior managers, and a meeting of 5 people for 60 minutes will cost 500$. So ideally project meetings and status reviews should be concise and should not be more than 30 minutes.
Client communications:
Organization often prefers to save their technical staff from client shocks and realities shocks. This has a serious negative impact on overall team productivity and organization profitability. Due to this reason technical people never realize the criticality of situation. Furthermore this phenomenon takes a lot of time of top management which could be more productive if spent on business development. It’s always better to assign some client liaison who is responsible for project and client handling who can be offshore or onshore.
Dare to delegate:
Phenomenon is similar to above mentioned situation, that we have to trust on our team member and we have to dare to delegate task to those who are responsible for it, rather doing everything by ourselves.
Keep an eye on holes of your ship:
Being a senior member of crew it is one of my basic responsible to observe where we are bleeding. Organizations have small pockets or cavities from where the money is bleeding and we never consider that. Major areas for these bleeding pockets are resource intensive support projects, infrastructure requirements and infrastructure backups. Ideally it’s the responsibility of finance and operations to highlight these areas and decision should be made on these on quarterly basis.
In my next post I will focus on lower management where issues are with project managers and team leads. then I will suggest tool and techniques to resolve these problems.
Every company strives for profitability and every organization try their best to make money with minimum efforts but only few make it possible, I think there some areas which were not discussed today or maybe we are not pondering a very serious attention to this matter. To me business Administration, understanding of people management is one of my favorite subjects and I have done a lot of researches in this area. Although we are missing with development standards we are lacking in PMO however I have seen many companies making good profit with minimum resource set. For example a company is getting more 250 million out of 35 resources with a single product best seller for black berry phones. Similarly people making huge money with minimum resources just because they have right set of tools and techniques with proper business projection. To me for any organization, following things are most important in profitability,
Business Direction and Dimension:
Every organization must know why they are in business, are there here for money or not, if they are in business for money then they should try to conceive and develop those products and services which are a business need, developing complex solution with labor intensive efforts ultimately result in failure until is not sold reasonably. A properly working paper pin is more profitable than a luxury weekend ride.
This phenomenon sometimes become product myopia, we develop what we love to develop but we never care if it has customer, so develop something which is a need of customer.
Project and Organization profitability index:
We should be able to forecast what will we get by the end of project and what will be the net worth of any task that we are doing. Usually projects with high variance, due to lack of analysis and change control often fell in this problem. we put our best effort to make project happen but without profit or at breakeven levels.
This is happening in many projects around but nobody is willing to perform any project cost to profit ratio. These profitability ratios are also important at the end of fiscal years when we had a time for organization growth; each organization must maintain its cash inflow to facilitate its requirements. Ideally project profitability index should be calculated on monthly basis in IT projects and for organization it should be performed on quarterly basis, which can be a simple balance sheet or a detailed analysis of profit to cost ratio.
Effort vs. profitability ratio:
In any organization most of the people spend their time in working and mostly they put their best however some companies make really good business while others don’t. to me that is simply because when people don’t know if their work will really make a good business or not. To put this in example I would say if a developer is working for 5 hours on a php project will make far less amount of $ than a developer working for SharePoint project. So we should focus on the line of business for projects.
Furthermore if a task is billed for 3 hours actually takes 10 hours of developer then we are doing nothing. So we should either communicate that to client or we should make sure that these hours are ultimately sellable. This is also called as Cost / Benefit Analysis, an economic decision-making approach, used particularly in business for assessment of whether a proposed project is worth doing, or to choose between several alternative ones. It involves comparing the total expected costs of each option against the total expected benefits, to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and by how much.
Project to Resource ratio analysis:
Ongoing project Can Be divided in to two types of projects, project which are not delivered and project which are delivered and in support mode. For any project in support mode we need to make sure that we are putting minimum resources, rather increase in timelines. An increase in project resource will exceed the cost of support however a slow delivering support makes more money and client relationships. We need to perform some sort of analysis to make sure we are putting minimum amount of effort to make good money from support requests.
Role of QA to productivity:
QA plays a vital role in any organization however QA is the only department with maximum leisure if not utilized properly. QA team should be a part of project management developing project plan, QA team should be a part of analysis and requirement gathering and QA team must be a part of post deployment supports. That’s the only way to get maximum out of it. Otherwise QA should not me 20% or 1:5 ratio in any project.
Hiring hiccups:
Organizations confused in hiring spend a reasonable amount of money and resource in this process. Hiring a single person requires hours and hours of senior resources in interviewing and shortlisting of employees. To me there is should be an analysis of resource requirement and forecast. If we have clear forecast that we need a resource for at least a year then we should jump in to hiring otherwise resource relocation is best option in such conditions.
Financial projection:
Every organization must have projection of its finances for at least 2 quarters, because if we don’t have that, then we should be ready for surprises. Simple project could be total number of current cash inflow + estimate cash inflow minus current cash outflow + expected cash outflow.
Forecasting the company's cash and financing needs is necessary to develop the company at the pace desired by the entrepreneurs and investors. One of the main issues confronting entrepreneurs almost daily is the issue of financing the company's activities. Correct forecasting of the company's financial needs in the short-, intermediate- and long-term involves an understanding of the management of transactions and a basic understanding of the concepts of revenues, expenses, and cash paid or received within them. Even for early stage companies, for which full-blown business plans may not even exist, no financial model and hence no forecasting regarding required capital can be prepared without making various assumptions with respect to the customer credit policy, the compensation policy, and other costs.
reason for this projection/financial plans.
First, the financial plan translates your company's goals into specific targets. It clearly defines what a successfully outcome entails. The plan isn't merely a prediction; it implies a commitment to making the targeted results happen and establishes milestones for gauging progress.
Second, the plan provides you with a vital feedback-and-control tool. Variances from projections provide early warning of problems. And when variances occur, the plan can provide a framework for determining the financial impact and the effects of various corrective actions.
Third, the plan can anticipate problems. If rapid growth creates a cash shortage due to investment in receivables and inventory, the forecast should show this. If next year's projections depend on certain milestones this year, the assumptions should spell this out.
Marketing and business developments
Many organization does not have a specialized marketing department/individuals which ultimately result in low business activity, marketing is a must part of any business, but many companies and top management thinks it’s as overhead rather growth.
Analysis and Estimations:
Everything which is done in any organization must be billable to make an organization growing. Usually organization does not consider estimated properly, a low estimated or wrong estimated project always ends up in variance, either in time or defiantly in budget. This is what happening we are not estimating properly or we are not capable enough to sell it. Estimations depend on analysis which means we are lacking in analysis of every project.
Client Perception Management:
Client perception management is a key to success in business. no comments because people already know what’s wrong with it.
recently imported many lists from a SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 instance, apparently things seems to be working fine however when click view or edit it does not comes up with values. after some research I found that there is a checkbox in list properties when you open it in SPD 2010 with text “Display new folder command on new menu” when I unchecked this option things starting working as expected. writing it here some it may be helpful to others.
I've been over and over the steps outlined in the CRM 2011 Email Router Installation Guide and cannot identify the reason the email router configuration is failing on "Users, Queues and Forward Mailboxes"/Load Data."
Error: Cannot retrieve user and queue information from CRM Server. May indicate ... server is busy. Verify URL is correct.... this problem can occur if specified login credentials are insufficient...
We have a CRM 2011 deployment which is accessible and working through browser http://crm2k11.OrganizationName.com. It is authenticating against a Win2003 Active Directory.
We have also installed crm 2011 email router on the same machine.The problem is that when we try to load the user data and queue we are getting the attached error.
Can you please inform us of the points we can check in order to get this working.
these were issues so we open a support incident for this situation and here what we did to resolve the issue.
As we are running CRM 2011 as dogfood, I found an interesting new feature of CRM 2011. When adding a new user, you have to approve their email for it to work properly, for instance in Outlook where you otherwise will get an error saying that the sending user does not have an email address.
So, if you get this error, just add an email address and press the "Approve Email" button in the ribbon.
at last there was dash(-) in our organization Name which we removed now everything is working perfectly.
it’s a presentation for Microsoft I am not sure if it is right to publish it or not but I couldn’t find any.
Register the cmdlets
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Crm.PowerShell
Get-CrmSetting TraceSettings
The output will resemble the following:
CallStack : True
Categories : *:Error
Directory : c:\crmdrop\logs
Enabled : False
FileSize : 10
ExtensionData : System.Runtime.Serialization.ExtensionDataObject
Set the Trace Settings
$setting = Get-CrmSetting TraceSettings
$setting.Enabled="True"
Set-CrmSetting $setting
Get-CrmSetting TraceSettings
The output will resemble the following:
CallStack : True
Categories : *:Error
Directory : c:\crmdrop\logs
Enabled : True
FileSize : 10
ExtensionData : System.Runtime.Serialization.ExtensionDataObject
make sure you have created the directory CRM server will not bother itself to create a directory for you rather it will throw internal exception in deployment manager.
