CRM 2011 – Setting up a new organisation – don’t forget to add users

I added a new organisation in CRM 2011 today and I am happy to report it was a pleasant stroll down easy street.

The first thing you have to make sure is the user is a member of the deployment administrator group (if you have done a certification you will have study that).

The second gotcha is you will have to make sure you have installed the Microsoft Dynamics SRS Data Connector because if you don’t you will not be able to add an organisation.

The adding of the organisation was easy but one thing you should remember is

DON’T FORGET TO ADD THE USERS TO THE ORGANISATION

This can be quite important if the Deployment Administrator is someone else because they might be busy doing something else, leaving you kicking your heels until they have added you in as a user.

I was also looking at the Deployment Manager and found this article which describes the new features in the deployment manager.  You should definitely read the whole article but I have taken what I think is the more important parts out of it.

This week’s feature: Deployment Manager Improvements

Deployment Manager is a server-side MMC-based tool used to administer a Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment.  Traditional actions performed by this tool include: managing servers, setting the reporting services URL, import/exporting organizations and controlling licenses.

Deployment Manager Improved Features:

• Manage Licensing (Improved)
  
• • Change Product Key (Note: The old menu was “upgrade license”, the new menu “Change Product Key” suggests more flexibility, but this is unconfirmed)
  • Upgrade from trial key
  • View License / CAL usage
• Manage an Organization (Improved)
• Import / Export organizations
• • NEW: You can import CRM 4.0 organizations and perform an “upgrade”. More on upgrades later
  • Create new organizations
• NEW: Configure Customer Experience Improvement Program participation
  Note: Can also be configured via the web client, same as in in CRM 4.0
  
• NEW: Configure IFD
  Note: In CRM 4.0, this was done via a command-line tool.
  
• NEW: Configure SSL Offloading / NLB
  Note: This is very cool and an area where Avanade worked with our customers and Microsoft to see this fixed in CRM 4 via rollup registry-based ‘hacks’.  In CRM 2011, it is a first class feature.

  

• NEW: Configure server URLs
  Note: In CRM 4.0, this had to be done using SQL directly and registry keys
  
• NEW: Configure Claims-based authentication
• NEW: View and control roll-up updates on indivual orgs (TBD)
• TBD: The manager now notifies you if updates are available, actual features here are TBD
• NEW: Welcome page with Deployment Summary, Tasks and Resources

Pictures are worth least a few paragraphs:

Updated “Welcome” page

IFD / Detailed URL configuration

Updated license information page

Deployment Summary
Some notes about alpha and beta:

• You need to use the “Run as Administrator” option in Windows Server 2008 when loading the Deployment Manager
• Create / Importing Organizations is very memory intensive in CTP4, you need to have approximately 500MB of free memory for the operation to complete successfully. This has been reported and will hopefully improve.