Problems installing CRM 2013

Installing a product like Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, or any other verison for that matter, might be a smooth trip down the newly paved highway, it can also be slightly bumpier. Today I've noted a few problems which might occur and how to resolve them.

In most of these cases, the problem is a result of different pre reqs that aren't quite in place, however the problems don't seem to occur due to these gaps in security or whatever the problem might be because unfortunately the error messages shown aren't exactly spot on at all times.

Username errors.
One issue that might occur is that you enter your service account uid and password correct, however you still get an error saying that the username or password is incorrect. This may be a result of a too long username. CRM seems to be using the Windows Server 2000 type usrename with domain\username look. That type has a max length of 20 characters in the username which will indeed create an incorrect username if you type a username of 20+ characters. The funny thing here is that the AD actually takes more than 20 characters and tries to verify it against a 20 character username that has been truncated.

SQL Server Agent is not running
This is another issue that might occur, and yes sometimes it's actually the SQL Server Agent service that is not running, this seems to be turned off and set as start manually as default if you don't do something about it. This may also be caused by having the firewall block certain ports that the SQL is using, this is default port 1433 but in some cases you might need 445 to be open.
If the firewall rules don't help one issue that can give this error is that the installing user isn't system administrator on the SQL server instance that you're installing CRM on, a pre req to install CRM but if you miss it this error message isn't exactly pointing you in the right direction.

Reporting Services not responding
This is an issue that I have run into too. This may of course be so simple as the reporting services part of SQL Server isn't installed, but it can also be that during the installation the settings were not set to default so no settings are available and the reporting services databases are not created. To fix this, start the Reporting Services Configuration Manager and pretty much just go through all the tabs and click apply which will set the default values unless you want to change something.

Hope this will help someone with these errors.



Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se