I was installing CRM 2011 and I almost had all my ducks in a row and was close to finishing the installation and then I hit problems with Reporting Services.
Anyone who installs CRM 2011 on a regular basis will know that most of the problems you have is with reporting services.
The last time I install CRM 2011 I had a problem with the reporting services, firstly I had to activate it and then manually set it up. Then I had run the latest SQL server service pack to upgrade the reporting services so it was a compatible version.
Back to today’s problem. luckily this error message was a popular one. The problem seemed to be when accessing the reporting server it couldn’t descrtyp the information.
The solution to this problem, the two blogs below have the solution
http://fczaja.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/report-server-cannot-decrypt-symmetric.html
Basically you have to delete the current encryption key and create a new.
I wasn’t sure if there were any reports which already existed because if their were you have to then go through and change the credentials for all of them.
to see if they had any reports I ran this SQL on the reporting services database
SELECT *
FROM [ReportServer].[dbo].[Catalog]
If the SQL statement doesn’t return anything or just one row then they haven’t been using reporting services.
In this case I don’t think reporting services had been probably setup or the person hadn’t finished setting it up.
I went through the steps covered in the blog and finished the installation.
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