CRM Update Rollup 2 Musings

Posted by Jim Steger on February 11, 2009

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As most of you know by now, Microsoft CRM Support has released Update Rollup 2 for Dynamics CRM 4.0. Here are some quick findings that we have discovered that I hope can be useful for some of you.

Exporting and importing customizations
Update Rollup 2 made some schema changes to the customizations and the rollup documentation provides a general warning about only export/importing customizations from system with the same rollup installed. This approach is painful for our development environment and for ISVs, as it is not easy to guarantee that all customers will be on the same rollup. What I learned from the product and support teams (and confirmed with some quick testing) is the schema changes to the customization file in UR2 is confined to just Templates and Outlook Synchronization areas.

Therefore, if you need to import/export between different rollup deployments, you should be ok provided you excluded those two customizations from your file.

I am hoping that CRM Support will be more specific with the customization schema changes on future rollup releases, or better yet, allow them to be backwards compatible between rollups.
Manually configured steps
There are a number of hotfixes that require manual configuration. I didn't see these documented too well (although I could have missed it). Anyway, here is a list that we have discovered. Note that this could just be a partial list.

• 955452 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955452/ ) Line feeds are not used when you send an e-mail message that uses an e-mail template to render data that has line feeds in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
• 955745 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955745/ ) Error message when you try to configure the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 client for Outlook: "This implementation is not part of the Windows Platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms"
• 956527 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956527/ ) The Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Outlook consumes three times as much memory in version 4.0 as in version 3.0
• 959248 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959248/ ) Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 slows to unacceptable levels when you process e-mail messages by using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM E-mail Router
• 957871 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957871/ ) The Workflow Expansion Task records cause the AsyncOperationBase table in the MSCRM database to grow too large in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Miscellaneous Notes/FAQ

• When you install any rollup, it will affect the entire deployment. For those of you that leverage multi-tenancy (as we do in our client development environment), you need to be aware of this and plan the release accordingly. Pay special care to the customizations changes and quickly review each hotfix within the rollup to ensure there won't be compatibility issues with your custom code. Naturally if your custom code follows the supported SDK, you should be ok from rollup to rollup.
• Update Rollup 2 may screw up your existing CRM web.config. I recommend you make a backup of the CRM web.config file prior to running the rollup. Here are two errors we have seen:
  • Publishing workflow rules fails. This error is now documented in the release notes. You need to update the CRM web.config files and add the following line to the <authorizedTypes> section:
    <authorizedType Assembly="mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" Namespace="System.Globalization" TypeName="CultureInfo" Authorized="True"/>
  • We had our IFD settings wiped out from the CRM web.config. To correct, we used the IFD tool to reset the values.
• Microsoft recommends that you keep the update rollups between the Outlook client and the CRM server in sync. I am not sure this is always a hard requirement, as we have some internal Outlook clients on the latest rollup, prior to updating our server. This is something you can test, if rolling out to your Outlook clients users is not always easy to do.
• Each rollup *should* be cumulative. This means that you can install UR2 on a system that hasn't been patched with UR1.