I have been releasing "Features of the week" internally for a little over a month now, so this is being posted now to "catch up" with the internal thread.  Going forward, I am going to try to post the highlights of one new CRM 2011 feature each week between now and RTM.  All of this is based on beta code and is subject to change.


This week’s feature: Deployment Manager Improvements

Deployment Manager is a server-side MMC-based tool used to administer a Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment.  Traditional actions performed by this tool include: managing servers, setting the reporting services URL, import/exporting organizations and controlling licenses.  With Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, this tool receives several subtle but very much needed improvements.  These improvements are designed to reduce cost to deploy and configure the deployment and take some operations that previously could only be done via direct database updates / command-line tools and provides a nice UI for them.

Deployment Manager Features:

  • Manage Deployment Administrators
  • View and disable/enable CRM servers
  • Manage Licensing (Improved)
    • Change Product Key (Note: The old menu was “upgrade license”, the new menu “Change Product Key” suggests more flexibility, but this is unconfirmed)   
    • Upgrade from trial key  
    • View License / CAL usage
       
  • Manage an Organization (Improved)
  • Configure SQL Reporting Services URL  
  • Configure which SQL Server  
  • Configure organization display name  
  • Configure default organization for the deployment  
  • Delete organizations  
  • Import / Export organizations
    • NEW: You can import CRM 4.0 organizations and perform an “upgrade”. More on upgrades later
    • Create new organizations
       
  • NEW: Configure Customer Experience Improvement Program participation
    Note: Can also be configured via the web client, same as in in CRM 4.0
  • NEW: Configure IFD
    Note: In CRM 4.0, this was done via a command-line tool.
  • NEW: Configure SSL Offloading / NLB
    Note: This is very cool and an area where Avanade worked with our customers and Microsoft to see this fixed in CRM 4 via rollup registry-based 'hacks'.  In CRM 2011, it is a first class feature.

    Deploy - SSL

  • NEW: Configure server URLs
    Note: In CRM 4.0, this had to be done using SQL directly and registry keys
  • NEW: Configure Claims-based authentication
  • NEW: View and control roll-up updates on indivual orgs (TBD)
  • TBD: The manager now notifies you if updates are available, actual features here are TBD
  • NEW: Welcome page with Deployment Summary, Tasks and Resources


Pictures are worth least a few paragraphs:

Deploy - Splash 

Updated “Welcome” page


Deploy - URLs
 

IFD / Detailed URL configuration



Deploy - Lic

Updated license information page


Deploy - Info 

Deployment Summary


Some notes about alpha and beta:

  • You need to use the “Run as Administrator” option in Windows Server 2008 when loading the Deployment Manager
  • Create / Importing Organizations is very memory intensive in CTP4, you need to have approximately 500MB of free memory for the operation to complete successfully. This has been reported and will hopefully improve.

Cheers,


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.