Using service account as CRM4 Web Application Pool identity

I have been trying to resolve a low priority Microsoft Dynamic CRM 4.0 unpleasant user experience for a little while and not going anywhere until today. The user experience is related to Workflow Associated view not returning records. The user can see all Workflow jobs from system job list but not in the Workflow Associated View. There was no error anywhere.
Today, I had to change the CRMAppPool identify from a user account to Network Service temporarily as someone disabled the user account in CRM and no one can login. As soon as this is changed, all users can log into CRM and able to see records in the Workflow Associated view. This lead me to think the original odd behaviour of Workflow Associated view not returning records is related to this CRMAppPool identity user account. So I did a few tests and here are the testing outcomes.

**CRMAppPool identity user account must be a CRM user or Internet Explorer will give user Server Erro in '/'Application - Login failed for user DOMAIN\username. To resolve this, set the CRMAppPool identity to use built-in Network Service account, recycle CRMAppPool and go back to CRM to add the user account. Then change the CRMAppPool identity from Network Service to the user account.

**CRMAppPool identity user account must be Enabled CRM user. If disabled, users will get "The system could not log you on. This could be because your user account or the Business Unit you belong to has been disabled in Microsoft Dynamic CRM." To resolve this issue, set the CRMAppPool identity to built-in Network Service, recycle the CRMAppPool. Re-enable the disabled user account and set the CRMAppPool back to the user.

**CRMAppPool identity user account must have at least 1 Security role assigned or user will get Licence Error in the Workflow Associated View.

**CRMAppPool identity user account should have System Administrator role assigned to work around the issue where Workflow Associated view not returning records.


If you are using the same user account to run the MSCRMAsynService, the same user account must be assigned a full license and system administrator role in CRM.

Interesting Statistics Tom Pisello, ITBusinessEdge.com, 12/2008

Today I received a newsletter discussed about some interesting statistics around workplace...

Organisations lose around:

* $1,250 per user in annual productivity because of time spent dealing with spam

* $1,800 unnecessary emails from co-workers

* $2,100 - $4,100 due to poorly written communications.

What does this mean to you?

Microsoft Dynamic CRM 4 Event Accelerator Installation

Today, I have installed the Microsoft Dynamic CRM 4.0 Event Accelerator onto a brand new CRM4 deployment on Windows sever 2008 R2 64 bit server. During the installation process, I experienced 3 issues:

1. Unable to save changes to web.config file located in web virtual directory due to permission error. "You don't have permission to save in this location. Contact the administrator to obtain permission. Would you like to save in the username folder instead?" My login has domain administrator role and is the creator and owner of the folder. Resolved this issue by manually share the folder with myself! Some new Server 2008 feature!

2.When browsing the sample customer portal site, saw this error "...an attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format". Found this blog "http://ts2community.com/blogs/larrylentz/archive/2009/08/07/crm-accelerators-and-sbs-2008.aspx" and replaced the microsoft.crm.sdk.dll and microsoft.crm.sdktypeproxy.dll files in the Event Management Web Site with the files in the sdk\bin\64-bit folder.

3. done a iisreset and browse the Sample Portal again, found "Object Reference not set to an instance of an object" error. Updated the sample portal web site binding to use the actual server ip address and all working now!

Now I can demonstrate the Event Management Portal to the end users!