Email router configuration

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Email router is almost an endless source of joy. One of these is to make it work. I wrote this for my own reference since it might be some time between the occations I have to setup an email router. 

The first thing you do is to launch the Email router configuration manager and what greets you is the profile tab. In this tab you set up incoming and outgoing profiles for your deployment(s). There needs to be at least one incoming and one outgoing profile, but in most occations there will be more of these.

To create a profile click the "new" button on the right. Here you have a couple of choices, the first one being to give your profile a name. In this example it will be "incoming" and the profile will be for incoming mail.

Here I have chosen a POP3 email server which gives us a couple of choices to make. One is Authentication type which can be NTML or clear text, I have chosen the latter here. With clear text it's recommended that you use SSL.

Then you just enter the server address and which credentials you want to use, in the case of POP3 you can choose "other specified" and "user specified". In this screen shot the other specified is marked and as you can see the user name i determined by the email address and that the password window is empty. This means that the user or queue you will associate this profile with will have the email address for user name and a password stored in the Email router. This means also that all users and queues using this profile will have to have the same password, which is NOT recommended and thus you need a profile for each user/queue and you need to update that profile each time the user or queue change the password. That is not good in a couple of ways, one being that you will need the password of the user and that's not best practice in any way.

 If you choose another email server type, for example Exchange 2010, you get another set of options. For Exchange Server 2010 the only way to access the server is using the web services which have a URL. This is entered in the location window and looks something like "http://mail.server.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx". In the screen shot I have just changed from POP3 to Exchange 2010.

For cretentials you have the same choices as in the POP3 case, but you can also chose "Local system account". The "other specified" looks a bit different from the POP3 case too. Here you can enter an admin account which has access to the email boxes that you want to use the router for. The same goes for the Local system account. I haven't used any of these in a live system and have been told, rather harshly, by an exchange expert that you don't want to do that. The third choice is user specified. This means that the user enters credentials into the CRM and those are used to access the email box, seems like the best way to handle this if you're using Exchange.
The result looks something like the image to the left. Another thing to think about if you're using Exchange 2007 is that the Webdav protocol doesn't seem to like some characters. We've had the entire router service shut down when an email entered the inbox with a subject containing a character that the email router did not appreciate.

 Now, the next thing we do have a look at is the Advanced tab.

Here we can change the ports we are using to connect to the server, this is definitely needed when changing the protocol to SSL.

 Now that we've done our incoming rule we need an outgoing rule. Again there are a couple of choices needed, the first being the name, next we choose outgoing for direction and in the second drop down we can choose either exchange online or SMTP. For this example SMTP is our choice.

 Then we have the authentication type. The choices being Windows Authentication, clear text and Anonymous. To be able to use credential type "Local system account" you need to use Windows authentication. Again, if you use clear text be sure to use SSL. After you choose authentication type, you need to enter the url to the SMTP server and finaly choose Access credentials.












In the next screen shot I have made my choices, in this case Clear text which only give me the choice of other specified for credentials. As you can see I've entered a username and a password in the credentials input fields. If I would have chosen anonymous, those fields wouldn't be available.

Again, the Exchange expert I was talking to recommended that you did not use anonymous access to the smtp server. Further she didn't like the idea of one user being able to send emails in the name of everybody in an organization. With this info on hand, the outgoing profile is more or less useless for everyone except queues, and even in that case it's quite a lot of job maintaing the system if you have a lot of queues. One thing I fins a bit curious is that you can't have the user specified credentials for outgoing email, that would have solved some problems at least.

If you need to change some port settings, the advanced tab looks roughly the same as the incoming rule advanced tab.




Now you are done with the profiles and you have a profile tab looking something like this.

Let's move on to the deployment tab. Here you set up wich CRM deployment you want to use. Again click on the "New" button on the right hand side and you get a new window with settings for the deployment.

Here you can choose to use an on-premise CRM, a partner hosted CRM or an on-line CRM. I chose on-premise (My Company) and entered the url for the crm, complete with port and organization name. Then I entered a user after chosing "Other specified" as credential type, the other choice is Local system account. Make sure to use a user with enough rights in the CRM, otherwise it might work in an unexpected way. The last two dropdowns specify if you want to use any profile as default, I chose not to do this.






After that is done we want to link our users and queues to profiles, that is done on the last tab

Here I have already clicked "Load Data" after chosing my deployment from the dropdown. All email router enabled users and queues from the organization are shown and you simply open them and add an incoming and/or outgoing profile to them. After that is done you press the "Test Access" button to se if there are any obvious errors done.

As you can see all data is entered correctly and the test went ok.












Now, this doesn't mean that it will work, this means there are no errors in the setup. And this ends this quick demo of how you set up a email router for CRM 2011, and CRM 4.0 since they differ very little if they do at all.

Hope this helps!

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

The CRM Email router routing emails into unexpected queues.

I've been working with the email router a couple of times the past few weeks and each time is a new bag of funny stuff. This jewel just keeps on giving.

The latest bit of interesting behaviour I found was that when an email is sent to two or more different queues it actually gets queued in all of them. This was a certain blog topic in my little head, but just to be sure about it I did a bit of resarch and found this blog which proved me wrong in my thought that an object only could be present in one queue at a time.


However, there was another thing that caught my interest and that was that a queue that isn't active on the email router can get email into it.

The queue support3 is set up like this in CRM and has no rule on the email router since it's just an alias.

This was a bit curious since I hadn't got an incoming rule set up for the queue. This is not that exact email but I reproduced the behaviour. What happened on the customer's system was that they were re organizing their incoming email and had a bit messy system for it so they forwarded the email from one address to another mailbox and we were polling that mailbox. Now, I tried to set up a queue using the email address that was being forwarded on the emailbox that had another username. This was not so popular with the email router setup so I reverted to the email address that matched the username. In this example it is support2. When I enabled that incoming rule on the email router, emails started coming into the queue of the forwarded email address.


What happened was that the email router polled the incoming box of support2, finding the email addressed to support3, looked the queues and found a match in support3 and delivered the email to support3.


Needless to say, I was a bit confused. I told the customer what just happened and he looked at me asking does the email enter the system and end up in the correct queue? Well, sort of, not the queue we planned it to enter, but the old queue. Fair enough, let it be, it's working.


I don't know if this is the way it's supposed to work but it could be a shortcut getting email into the system using one email box and a heap of aliases. Sort of the forward email box but without having to put the original email into an attachment.


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

Powershell on ifd server

Configuring Internet Facing Deployment is no easy task by itself and when you're done, well the CRM is up and running at least, it's easy to miss some of the settings that's needed.

This might not be the case for everyone doing this but it certainly was to me. I had been struggling with the ADFS and IFD for some time that it started to be something of a blurr what I had been changing and what was untouched. Anyway, the CRM was up, the IFD was working, everyone's happy.

What happened next was that the disk was getting full on the server and I noticed I had forgotten to turn off the trace. Since this can be done either by the registry or by changing the database with powershell I started by looking at the registry and no keys were set there, moving along to the database using powershell.

The good-ole' "Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Crm.Powershell" gave me no headaches, that was about to change though. When I entered "Get-CrmSetting TraceSettings" the following message returned:

Get-CrmSetting : The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.
At line:1 char:15
+ Get-CrmSetting <<<<  TraceSettings
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-CrmSetting], WebException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.Net.WebException,Microsoft.Crm.PowerShell.GetCrmSettingCmdlet

 This made me a bit confused since everything else was working fine. A bit of searching lead me to looking at the Deployment manager and what was set there.

This is what the Web Address settings looked like and the IFD was pointing at adfs.domain.com. The solution to my problem was just to change the web address to that of the IFD and bingo, powershell was happy again. To turn off the tracing of the CRM server is a different story, that part lives it's own life.

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

CRM has encountered a problem

I recently ran into the annoying pop up when I closed a window saying CRM has encountered a problem... asking if I wanted to send a message to Microsoft. When I looked at the info about to be sent, the error message was "The disk is full".

This made me a bit worried since I just cleared trace logs since june on that machine after a lot of testing and reconfiguration of the ADFS and IFD. The disk was far from full I realized after logging in to the server and taking a look, no problems in the database either.

I tried to find similar errors but there were no real answers for me which turned me to Microsoft's forum where I asked a question about this.
The obvious answer I got was "Have you turned on trace and looked at the logs?". That was of course one thing I hadn't done, even though I had a look at the trace directory, and an almost as obvious return question as "have you published your changes".
The trace gave me a clue about where to look since the culprit was the "refresh.png" in the Activity Feeds addon.

This clue gave me a bit more to go on and there were indeed quite a few having problems with activity feeds i general and the refresh.png in particular. One thing that was common was that the error message in the trace gave the path as ".../refresh.png" when the web resource name is ".../msdyn_/refresh.png". The second path was accessable with a browser and the first one wasn't. Still I have had Activity Feeds work on several installations so the addon itself can't be the entire problem.

On the website for Activity Feeds I saw  few comments about Activity Feed not being available in this or that langage. That made me a bit curious since we had an English server installation with a Swedish MUI on top and the tennant I had problems with had Swedish as base language.
I opened the organization and enabled English, refreshed the Explorer and bingo, no problems anymore.

This raises a few questions. Why can Activity Feed translade a faulty URL when there is English provishoned? Why did the Swedish base language mess things up (I suppose) and why on earth is the error message sent to Microsoft "The disk is full".


The error messages in CRM is a story by itself so this is no "one hit wonder".

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

CRM 4.0 upgrade quits with error Attachment file size is too big.

I recently had an assignment to upgrade a CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011 which at first looked like a very straight forward upgrade since there were close to none customizations done to the system. That quickly changed when I started the upgrade process which halted with the error message "Attachment file size is too big". It seems no one encountered this problem since there wereno relevant examples of how to deal with it.


What seemed like a very straight forward migration upgrade soon turned into something of a stand still. I had installed the new server which went very good and the old database backup was restored to the new SQL server. It was a 16 GB database but there were no customizations to talk about.
I was rather pussled when the upgrade returned an error about Attachment size to big, I hadn't seen that before, nor had my colleague Gustaf Westerlund, and I didn't recall anything about it in the installation material either. The error message in the trace looked like this:

12:34:29| Error| Exception occured during Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.OrganizationUpgrader: Action Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.UpgradeNewSolutionAwareEntities failed.
InnerException:
Microsoft.Crm.CrmException: Attachment file size is too big.
at Microsoft.Crm.ObjectModel.AttachmentServiceBase.ValidateAttachmentFileSize(Int32 base64dataSize, ExecutionContext context)
at Microsoft.Crm.ObjectModel.AttachmentServiceBase.Update(IBusinessEntity entity, ExecutionContext context)
at Microsoft.Crm.ObjectModel.MailMergeTemplateService.Update(IBusinessEntity entity, ExecutionContext context)
at Microsoft.Crm.ObjectModel.SolutionsUpgrade.SolutionAwareEntityUpgradeBase.Upgrade(ExecutionContext context)
at Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.UpgradeNewSolutionAwareEntities.Do(IDictionary parameters)
at Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Common.CrmAction.ExecuteAction(CrmAction action, IDictionary parameters, Boolean undo)

I turned to the safest place to find answers, the INTERNET.

Normally when I search for information about CRM I get a ton of links pointing in all types of directions. This time there were two pages total, not a good sign. It would be clear that almost none of them handled my particular problem, most of them pointed out that you need to set the attachment size in the settings of the organization which wasn't an option.
Or so I thought.

Since we wanted to rule out the customer's server I moved the database backup to one of our development servers which gave the same result. The next move was to import the database to a CRM4 server in our development environment, perhaps it would help to get a higher UR of CRM 4. The import to our development CRM 4 server went smooth, no problems at all. This made me very hopeful but that hope went right out the window when I made a new backup of the imported organization and restored it on the CRM 2011 server, still problems with too large attachments.

It didn't help to edit the web.config to increase attachment file size either. However, that I was able to import the organization to our CRM 4 server made me a bit hopeful. It was possible to import the organization to a CRM 4 server but not to upgrade it to a CRM 2011, how was this possible?

After snooping around in settings and general places of the CRM 4 organization I saw that the attachment file size set in CRM 4 was 0, which in the picture below is set to 5 MB (I don't have any english CRM 4.0 available at the moment, sorry). This might mean that it has no max file size in CRM 4 since it obviously had file attached to emails however the setting seems to have a different meaning in CRM 2011. I set the max file size to 36 MB and took a new backup of the organization database, moved it to the CRM 2011 server and did an import.

Bingo. The upgrade went smooth and I had an upgraded organization that I was able to log in to. I find it a bit odd that this haven't happened to anyone blogging before me though

Please let me know if this has helped you, it would be nice to know I'm not alone :)

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

Further digging in the ODATA interface

I was previously wondering where I could find the list of "sets" that are used to fetch data using the ODATA endpoint. It seems the answer was rediculously easy.

To make a short story even shorter, what you need to do is to surf to the ODATA endpoint and the CRM will present the complete list to you. 

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

Sales Pipeline report

The whole concept Sales Pipeline was a bit fuzzy for me not very long ago, especially in CRM. There are no obvious places that the sales pipeline stages get set when you look at the Opportunity form. Unfortunately it gets worse when you start looking at the Sales Pipeline Report

I found it quite strange that the sales pipeline stage was a string field on the opportunity form, well not ON the form per se but among the fields in the entity, that is supposed to be set by a workflow for example. I didn't see the logic with this field. Why would you want a string field for set names, I found it more reasonable to have a multiple choice field where the step names would be pre determined. It would be obvious that it doesn't matter at all.

The funny thing with this field is that in CRM 4.0, the only thing it really does is showing the pipeline stage on the lower right corner of the opportunity form, that's it. It has no other relevance to anything at all. In CRM 2011 that field is the default horizontal category of the Sales Pipeline chart, which makes this even more confusing since the Sales Pipeline report is available in CRM 2011 too.

Now, what is the "problem" with the Sales Pipeline report? The problem is that the Sales Pipeline report doesn't use the stepname field at all. The Sales Pipeline report pipeline stepnames is taken from the phase names of the workflow that has run on the opportunity. Further, the sales process that you filter the report on is the name of the workflow that has run on the opportunity. But it gets even a bit more complicated, to count the workflow as a sales process, the workflow needs to have phases in it.

I will try to make this a bit more comprehensive. The Sales Pipeline report has a filter option that is called "Sales process". This is actually any workflow that has phases in it and is run on any opportunity. Further, the pipeline step names are the names of these phases in the workflow. That doesn't seem too complicated.
There is of course another thing that makes this a bit of a problem. The sales pipeline report doesn't sort out opportunities, it sorts out the workflows that has been active. This means that if you have run a workflow several times on an opportunity, for example if the workflows exits and you restart it manually. When you do this a new instance of that workflow is stored in the CRM database, which is completely understandable since you want to be able to see what workflows has been active on an object.

The Sales Pipeline report sees this and in the scope of the report every workflow that has been active is a valid record that should be shown on the report. The result is that you have an opportunity that has a calculated value of €100000 and you have run the sales workflow five times on that opportunity for whatever reason, the shown value on the report is €500000, which will make the opportunity value of the company very good. It will however mess up the total result of the company since even if they win the opportunity the value will only be a fifth of the calculated value of what have been reported in the pipeline.

This is not much of a problem if you are having a sales process that doesn't fork or almost always runs in a straight line and never has to restarts.  It does however mess up your reports if you would have a split sales process workflow or if you restart the sales workflow for some reason, in our case we needed to do this to be able to change the sales person responsible of the opportunity so that the new responsible would get tasks created.

I started to sketch up a solution where old workflows would be deleted which would keep the Sales Pipeline report correct but it would delete the workflows so the history would be lost. The final solution to this problem was to set up a paralell workflow which only would keep track of the sales pipeline steps which kept the sales process in a neat single straight flow based on the stepname field giving it the correct phase in the pipeline report.

You can probably edit the pipeline report to match something else than the phase name of the workflow but the data sets for the report is in no way simple so I considered it to consume too much time for this problem.


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