From the Desk of Brandon Haynes

In installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, I ran across a couple of installation issues. These were mostly circumventable, but I thought I’d aggregate them here in case anyone out there has similar problems:

1. The installer created a CRM website, but failed to configure it as an application. I have a very specific server configuration, so this may have caused the problem. Nonetheless, I had to visit IIS and configure my CRM website as its own application and enable Windows Authentication. I believe it was also necessary to configure default.aspx as a default document as well.
2. It was a requirement that the system be exposed via a single SSL port, and this caused some headaches. Obviously, I had to configure the SSL port in IIS. Because this port was different than the non-SSL port configured at installation, there were some registry and database changes required. Specifically:
   1. Under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSCRM, the ServerUrl key needs to be updated.
   2. In the DeploymentProperties table of the MSCRM_CONFIG database, the rows with ColumnName in {‘AsyncSdkRootDomain’, ‘ADSdkRootDomain’, ‘ADWebApplicationRootDomain’, and ‘ADRootDomainScheme’} need to be updated. The column to update is NVarCharColumn. Value is of the format ‘server:port’ (e.g.; ‘microsoft.com:5556’). If running under SSL, you’ll need to update the last key, ADRootDomainScheme, to ‘https’ (also using the NVarCharColumn column).
3. Once I had executed the above changes, the client tool still complained about being able to connect to the server. Using Fiddler, I was able to determine that there was an authentication problem. Modifying the registry keys under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient did the trick. Apparently the organization was appended to the web application directories, which resulted in a 404 upon connection. I modified WebAppUrl and IntranetServerUrl, but I recommend reviewing all the keys.
4. Apparently the client requires anonymous access to be enabled on the _imgs subdirectory of the CRM installation. This corrected my final authentication issue. Thanks to the poster here for this solution.
5. Finally, after the client installed and connected properly, I received an error when loading outlook which read “An error occurred loading Microsoft Dynamics CRM functionality.” This was apparently due to a conflict between an old 3.0 installation and the 4.0 software. 3.0 failed to fully clean up after itself. Manually removing the duplicate CRM menu did the trick; I used View->Toolbars->Customize, right clicked on the depreciated 3.0 menu, and selected Delete. Restarted Outlook and I was up and running.

That’s a lot of work to get things up and running, but FAR less of a hassle than I experienced in tinkering with the 3.0 version.

B