CRM 2011 installation error – SQL Server: The instance name must be the same as computer name

I got this error on a recent CRM Install.

The reason for this error was because the name of the SQL Server machine had been changed after SQL Server 2012 had been installed.

So what I think basically happens when you install CRM it creates the default instance with the same name as the computer – server name.

So I believe the CRM 2011 installation was looking for the service name which is the same name as the server and couldn’t find one.

luckily there is a couple of good blogs written on this

http://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmtechnical/b/zhongchenzhoustipstricksandportaldevelopment/archive/2012/04/28/dynamics-crm-2011-installation-error-the-instance-name-must-be-the-same-as-computer-name.aspx

http://mscrmuk.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/sql-server-instance-name-must-be-same.html

The answer to this problem is to rename the instance name with some SQL commands I never come across before.

Open up an SQL Query window and type

sp_helpserver 

This will give you the name of the current server instance and a bunch of other values (but don’t worry about those)

We now need to drop this name by running the SQL command below, You put the value of the incorrect server name in the quotes  (where I have INCORRECT SERVER NAME”

SP_DROPSERVER “INCORRECT SERVER NAME”

now run the command below and the name in the quotes is the name of the server, don’t forget to add the comma local at the end otherwise the sql statement will error.

SP_ADDSERVER “DATABASE-1”, local

After you have done the change you can run

sp_helpserver 

It should return the changed value.

You now need to run restart SQL Server and try the CRM install verification again

Advertisement

CRM 2011 – Why can’t I add my report to a solution

The quick answer to the question is for me to stop being an idiot.

I had written my report, I had uploaded the report, it was running fine.

I then tried to add the report into the solution, opened my solution –> reports –> adding existing

I then couldn’t find my report!

checked the reports, yep it’s there

did an advanced find, the report appears.

I then edited the report and remembered, this report is a my report, a personal report.

This is the same as creating a personal view, unless you share it everyone then no one else can see.

Reports are slightly different because you can choose an option called Make available to organisation.

To find this option you have to go to the report you created –> Edit –> Actions –> make available to organisation

Then everyone can see it and more importantly you can add to your solution

if you have a change of mind and want the report to be viewed by only you, you can in Actions choose to revert  to personal report.

CRM 2011 – Reporting options in CRM

I had to write a report for a customer this week and unfortunatly I wasn’t able to write the report using the report wizard.

This was very bad news because all other reporting methods take a lot more time.

So what are my options

• Dashboard and charts
• Reporting wizard (although for this report it wasn’t any use)
• Excel Powerpivot
• SRS reports – FetchXML
• SRS reports – SQL

To give you some background one of the reports was a report grouping on date (month, year), another group of accounts and another group of Call Type.  In the report they wanted to show the number of resolved calls and the percentage of each call type.

Dashboards and charts were not really used for this because this was a report rather than a visual graph.  I am a big fan of charts and dashboards but one aspect that makes them a harder sell is the dashboards and charts cannot be scheduled and can’t be exported from CRM without doing a print screen (or I haven’t found a way to do this yet, please comment if you know how)

I was able to run the report in Excel PowerPivot, although it took me a while to work out why I couldn’t group the date by month (as seen in many Google searches on the subject).  If you cannot group/format a date in excel to month this is probably because there are some blanks in the date field, if you fill in this blanks you will then be able to format the date by month.

The excel PowerPivot report looked very good and has the advantage of being self sufficent.  What I mean by this is once you have saved the Excel report onto your hard drive you can run the report from your machine without opening CRM and the reason you can do this is because you can refresh the data within Excel.

I think excel is a really useful tool because you can also view the individual lines behind the graph, so it does give you a bit of drill down in basic terms.

I do find some users don’t view reports in Excel very highly and almost don’t see this as a legitimate solution to their reporting needs.

 

I tried to write the report using FetchXML, this does make writing reports quite simple because all you need to do is create the correct advanced find and then download the fetchXML.  The problem I had with this method was all the grouping had to be done then in the report.  My SRS reporting skills are not great and I couldn’t really get round the problem of the report displaying every line, e.g. every call, I didn’t want this I wanted a summary count of the different call types.

Searching around I found you can group one item in a fetchXML.

The other solution is using SQL and doing selects from Filteredlists.  The reason it’s good practise to use filtered lists is these lists automatically add the CRM security to the selects as if you are viewing the records in CRM.  It can be a bit slower and some reports don’t need to worry about security if you are showing summary values and not individual records.

The benefit of creating an SQL report is you can group the data in the SQL statement and use the report to just show the data.

The downside to using SRS is it’s hard to use and formatting the report can be a puzzling and time consuming practise of trial and error.

I really wish Microsoft would supply an easy to use reporting system on the same lines as the dashboards and charts.  Reporting is one of the key areas for CRM, useful reports can help get support for a CRM project from the key decision makers.

My hope is the Sharepoint/SQL Server 2012 new reporting tools are very good and if they are not then Microsoft should buy a company which has already developed a reporting tool.

 

So in the end I did the report in Excel PowerPivot and a version in SRS reports using an SQL statement I wrote.

CRM 2011 – No reports working in CRM

I had a very odd and unusual problem, actually I say that most problems that involve reporting services are almost always odd and not unusual.

I was working on CRM which had already been setup (not by be) and the users were having problems with reports.

The problem was none of the built in reports were working, you also couldn’t upload any reports.

When you tried to run a report I got a

Microsoft CRM Error Report saying

Cannot run OOB report, unless SRS Data connector is installed

it is possible to use CRM with out SRS data connector working, you won’t have any reports.  The odd thing here was all the reports were in CRM, they just weren’t working.

I installed the SRS data connector but I was still getting the error message.

Initially I thought the problems were because the installation was done on a named instance.

The installation of the SRS connector seemed to work without any problems.  So I tried running the repairs and configs on the CRM server, still no joy.

I finally disabled the organisation, edited the organisation and then pressed next.  I got a message about the SQL server setup.

I ran the SQL Server configuration tool and found the FULL TEXT Search, SQL Server Replication and Client Tools connectivity had not been enabled.

I added the in and reinstalled the SRS Connector.  I now got a different error message in reports

Error occurred while getting the data source contents

which finally took me to this blog page

http://weblogs.asp.net/pabloperalta/archive/2011/09/05/error-occurred-while-getting-the-data-source-contents-for-the-report.aspx

One thing I also noticed is that when I went to the reports manager

http:///Reports/

there were no reports for any organisations, which explained why I couldn’t run any of the default reports but the question was how do I load them.

The blog post above says you can use the tool

PublishReports

which is a command line tool to load the default reports, you need to just pass it the name of your organisation

publishreports organisationName

after running this the reports were loaded into CRM and I could finally run reports.

it took me ages but I finally resolved all the problems