Tag Archives: dynamics crm

google, microsoft, tech

Chromium and Microsoft annoyances : Dynamics CRM issues like broken downloads, Chromium team “won’t fix”

Microsoft Dynamics CRM (which exists in both cloud-hosted and on-premises versions) is not working well with Chromium, the open source browser engine used by Google Chrome.

I discovered one obvious issue using Edge Preview, which is based on Chromium. If you download a file, for example using a Word template, Microsoft Office does not recognise it. It turns out to have single quotes around it. I imagine the quotes are there to allow for document names which include spaces, but it should use double quotes. Chromium (and Chrome) used to work OK with single quotes but now does not. It’s causing quite a bit of grief for CRM users in businesses that have standardised on Chrome.

You can read all the details here. Here’s a user report by Troy Siegert, whose organization frequently downloads files from Dynamics:

This week when the Chrome beta build went mainstream, my 30 users suddenly had Windows 10 unable to determine what to do with the files they were so dutifully downloading and trying to look at. Instead of *Report.pdf* the file was named *’Report.pdf’* and of course Windows 10 has no idea what a *.pdf’* file is or what to do with it, so it started asking users questions for which they weren’t prepared and that they didn’t understand. Some of them got confused and tried to associate .xlsx files with Adobe and then became unhappy when Adobe was throwing up messages about corrupt files.

Google’s Abdul Syed responds:

For any server operators running into this issue, the way to fix for this is to use double quotes around any quoted string in the Content-Disposition header (And, more generally, in any HTTP header).

Translation: fix your stuff, don’t expect us to fix our stuff. And in fact the issue has been marked WontFix (Closed).

There was actually a bit of a battle about this. The original commit here (Oct 2018) was reverted here (Feb 12 2019) and unreverted here (Feb 19 2019). In other words, the Chromium team knew it broke downloads for Dynamics CRM users but were not willing to compromise.

I am in two minds about this one. Dynamics CRM is sloppy in places and part of me favours giving Microsoft’s team a kick to make them fix thing that should have been fixed years back.

On the other hand, Mozilla Firefox works fine with the CRM single quotes and you cannot help wondering if Google’s attitude would be different were it a Google application that is impacted.

microsoft, tech

Want to connect PowerBI to Dynamics 365 CRM on-premises? Good luck with the official documentation

Microsoft champions hybrid IT, that is, some IT on-premises, some in the cloud; but its cloud-first strategy means that on-premises customers sometimes have a hard time getting the most from their software.

I have posted before about Dynamics CRM, which is very expensive but in places oddly sloppy, as if Microsoft has quality control issues or just does not care about some of the details in the product.

I encountered another example of this when attempting to configure Power BI desktop to connect to an on-premises instance of Dynamics CRM. At one time this was not supported, but it is now possible using OAuth to authenticate (presuming you have an internet-facing CRM deployment, which is generally the case).

There is an official document explaining how to set this up here.

That said, it seems that whoever wrote the document did not follow through the steps to check that they work, because they do not.

The first error is in in the documentation for enabling OAuth, which tells you to use ClaimsSettings in PowerShell:

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However this is not the right setting, and the steps given will give you an error. The correct setting is called OAuthClaimsSettings. It is disabled by default. Set it to enabled using similar steps to those above.

Second, the document tells you to run the Add-Adfsclient command “on the PC where you are running Power BI Desktop”. In fact this must be run on the server where ADFS is installed.

The command itself is not all that reassuring:

Add-AdfsClient -ClientId “a672d62c-fc7b-4e81-a576-e60dc46e951d” -Name “Microsoft Power BI” -RedirectUri @(“https://de-users-preview.sqlazurelabs.com/account/reply/”, “https://preview.powerbi.com/views/oauthredirect.html”) -Description “ADFS OAuth 2.0 client for Microsoft Power BI”

Note the word “preview” that appears a couple of times in this mysterious command.

Even if you do all this, many people have struggled with connection issues. For myself, when I got this working on a test setup, I still got the error:

OData: The feed’s metadata document appears to be invalid. Error: The metadata document could not be read from the message content.

The fix in my case was to use “https://orgname.yourdomain/XRMServices/2011/Organizationdata.svc” for the feed, instead of “https://orgname.yourdomain/api/data/v8.2/”. Then I was up and running.

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Maybe someone just needs to tell Microsoft to fix its documentation? A good point, but Cobalt’s Chris Capistran pointed out the errors back in April and nothing has changed.

Of course this sort of thing is not all bad for Microsoft partners, who can come in with superior knowledge and get things working.

microsoft, Notes from the field, rants, tech

Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 2016/365: part brilliant, part perplexing, part downright sloppy

I have just completed a test installation of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM on-premises; it is now called Dynamics 365 but the name change is cosmetic, and in fact you begin by installing Dynamics CRM 2016 and it becomes Dynamics 365 after applying a downloaded update.

Microsoft’s Dynamics product has several characteristics:

1. It is fantastically useful if you need the features it offers

2. It is fantastically expensive for reasons I have never understood (other than, “because they can”)

3. It is tiresome to install and maintain

I wondered if the third characteristic had improved since I last did a Dynamics CRM installation, but I feel it has not much changed. Actually the installation went pretty much as planned, though it remains fiddly, but I wasted considerable time setting up email synchronization with Exchange (also on-premises). This is a newish feature called Server-Side Synchronization, which replaces the old Email Router (which still exists but is deprecated). I have little love for the Email Router, which when anything goes wrong, fills the event log with huge numbers of identical errors such that you have to disable it before you can discover what is really going wrong.

Email is an important feature as automated emails are essential to most CRM systems. The way the Server-Side Synchronization works is that you configure it, but CRM mailboxes are disabled until you complete a “Test and Enable” step that sends and receives test emails. I kept getting failures. I tried every permutation I could think of:

  • Credentials set per-user
  • Credentials set in the server profile (uses Exchange Impersonation to operate on behalf of each user)
  • Windows authentication (only works with Impersonation)
  • Basic authentication enabled on Exchange Web Services (EWS)

All failed, the most common error being “Http server returned 401 Unauthorized exception.” The troubleshooting steps here say to check that the email address of the user matches that of the mailbox; of course it did.

An annoyance is that on my system the Test and Enable step does not always work (in other words, it is not even tried). If I click Test and Enable in the Mailbox configuration window, I get this dialog:

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However if I click OK, nothing happens and the dialog stays. If I click Cancel nothing happens and the dialog stays. If I click X the dialog closes but the test is not carried out.

Fortunately, you can also access Test and Enable from the Mailbox list (select a mailbox and it appears in the ribbon). A slightly different dialog appears and it works.

I was about to give up. I set Windows authentication in the server profile, which is probably the best option for most on-premises setups, and tried the test one more time. It worked. I do not know what changed. As this tech note (which is about server-side synchronization using Exchange Online) remarks:

If you get it right, you will hear Microsoft Angels singing

But what’s this about sloppy? There is plenty of evidence. Things like the non-functioning dialog mentioned above. Things like the date which shows for a mailbox that has not been tested:

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Or leaving aside the email configuration, things like the way you can upload Word templates for use in processes, but cannot easily download them (you can use a tool like the third-party XRMToolbox).

And the script error dialog which has not changed for a decade.

Or the warning you get when viewing a report in Microsoft Edge, that the browser is not supported:

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so you click the link and it says Edge is supported.

Or even the fact that whenever you log on you get this pesky dialog:

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So you click Don’t show this again, but it always reappears.

It seems as if Microsoft does not care much about the fit and finish of Dynamics CRM.

So why do people persevere – in fact, the Dynamics business is growing for Microsoft, largely because of Dynamics 365 online and its integration with Office 365. The cloud is one reason, which removes at least some of the admin burden. The other thing though is that it does bring together a set of features that make it invaluable to many businesses. You can use it not only for sales and marketing, but for service case management, quotes, orders and invoices.

It is highly customizable, which is a mixed blessing as your CRM installation becomes increasingly non-standard, but does mean that most things can be done with sufficient effort.

In the end, it is all about automation, and can work like magic with the right carefully designed custom processes.

With all those things to commend it, it would pay Microsoft to work at making the user interface less annoying and the administration less prone to perplexing errors.

Notes from the field, tech

Kaspersky encrypted connection scanning breaks ADFS login, internet-facing Dynamics CRM

I was asked to look at a case where a user could not log in to Dynamics CRM. This is an internet-facing deployment which uses ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services). The user put in valid credentials but received a 401 – unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials.

The odd thing from the user’s perspective is that everything worked fine on other PCs; but switching web browsers did not fix it.

I noticed that Kaspersky anti-virus was installed.

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Pausing Kaspersky made no difference to the error. However I came back to this after eliminating some other possible problems. I noticed that if you looked at the certificate on the ADFS site it was not from the site itself, but a Kaspersky certificate.

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The reason for this is that Kaspersky wants to inspect encrypted traffic for malware.

I understand the rationale but I dislike this behaviour. Your security software should not hide the SSL certificate of the web site you are visiting. Of course it is particularly dislikeable if it breaks stuff, as in this case. I found the setting in Kaspersky and disabled both this feature, and another which injects script into web traffic (though this proved not to be the culprit here), for the sake of Kaspersky’s “URL Advisor”).

Personally I feel that encrypted traffic should only be decrypted in the recipient application. Kaspersky’s feature is an SSL Man-in-the-Middle attack and to my mind reduces rather than increases the security of the PC. However you made the decision to trust your anti-virus vendor when you installed the software.

There are other anti-virus solutions that also do this so Kaspersky is not alone. As to why it breaks ADFS I am not sure, but regard this as a good thing since the user’s SSL connection is compromised.

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As it turns out, it isn’t essential to disable the feature entirely. You can simply set an exclusion for the ADFS site by clicking Manage exclusions.

Posted here in case others hit this issue.

microsoft, windows

Microsoft financials April-June 2016: on track but continued drift away from consumers

3 Comments

Microsoft has announced its latest financials, and I have made a quick table summarising the year-on-year comparison for the quarter. See the end of this post for what the confusing segment categories represent.

Quarter ending  June 30th 2016 vs quarter ending June 30th 2015, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Operating income Change
Productivity and Business Processes 6969 +308 3000 -167
Intelligent Cloud 6711 +415 2190 -443
More Personal Computing 8897 -346 964 +359
Corporate and Other -1963 -1943 -3074 +5384

A few observations.

Office 365 is Microsoft’s current big success. According to the company’s press release, Office 365 revenue grew 54%, which is huge. However, on-premise sales declined which meant that overall revenue growth in “Office commercial products and cloud services” was only 5%. Still, that’s a successful transition.

The picture was similar in consumer Office, with Office 365 consumer increasing by 23.1% while overall revenue grew by only 19%.

Dynamics CRM is moving to the cloud. Microsoft says that Dynamics CRM online grew by more than 2.5 times, while overall revenue grew only 6%. The maths may be deceptive, if CRM online grew from a small base, but it is a clear trend. Not to be confused with Dynamics 365, which is ERP/Business process management, though Nadella is also bullish on the latter.

Azure revenue grew 102%.  Microsoft’s cloud results are not quite as sparkling as those from Amazon Web Services, but still impressive.

Enterprise Mobility is growing. This is a suite of tools built around InTune, Microsoft’s Mobile Device Management solution.

Surface is doing OK. Revenue up 9% thanks to Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book.

Windows news is mixed. “Windows OEM non-Pro revenue grew 27% and OEM Pro 2%” says the release, which given the weak PC market is decent. Windows 10 is at 350 million active devices, which Nadella said in the earnings webcast is the fastest ever adoption rate for a new version Windows; hardly surprising given the free upgrade offer and high-pressure upgrade marketing.

Xbox news is mixed. Gaming revenue is down 9%. Xbox Live revenue grew 4% but Xbox console revenue is down.

Windows Phone dives towards oblivion. Revenue is down 71%, from a base that was already tiny.

Microsoft cares less and less about consumers. “We will deliver more value and innovation” in Windows, says Nadella, “particularly for enterprise customers.” I also note the remark in the press release that “Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 16% (up 17% in constant currency) with continued benefit from Windows 10 usage,” suggesting that part of the Windows 10 consumer strategy is to use it as a vehicle for advertising; this is known in the business as “adware” and does not encourage me; it will push canny users towards Mac or Linux. In the earnings call, Nadella said that 40% of search advertising revenue is from Windows 10 devices. “The Cortana search box has over 100 million monthly active users with 8 billion questions asked to date,” said Nadella.

A reminder of Microsoft’s segments:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, both commercial and consumer, including retail sales, volume licenses, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Skype consumer, OneDrive, Outlook.com. Microsoft Dynamics including Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, both online and on-premises sales.

Intelligent Cloud: Server products not mentioned above, including Windows server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, as well as Microsoft Azure.

More Personal Computing: What a daft name, more than what? Still, this includes Windows in all its non-server forms, Windows Phone both hardware and licenses, Surface hardware, gaming including Xbox, Xbox Live, and search advertising.

microsoft

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 hassles: asynchronous processing service stopped

2 Comments

I installed Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 a few days ago – rarely a straightforward task, thanks to Active Directory dependencies and the complexities of Windows security. There also seem to be unfixed bugs in the setup. For example, I always find that the trace directory is incorrectly configured and has to be fixed via PowerShell, even with a new install on a new installation of Windows Server 2008 R2.

Never mind. This time I came across a new problem. After a successful install, users reported errors in scheduled jobs and imports. An attempted import resulted in the message Waiting for Resources.

The problem was that the two CRM Asynchronous Processing Services were not running. Start them manually, and everything works.

The event log reported Event ID 7000 after the last reboot – “the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion”.

The solution in my case was to set the start action on these services to Automatic (Delayed Start). They now start OK after a reboot.

I suspect this problem may be related to update rollup 12, since the very same problem appeared on another Dynamics CRM 2011 install after applying this.

I also wonder if the fact that SQL Server is on the same VM is related. If CRM starts before SQL Server is fully running, you get this kind of problem.