CRM2011 Outlook Client - Outlook hangs when Loading Profile

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Hello,

Ever since updating from Rollup 10 (which caused a heap of other issues when it broke all of the old endpoints) we have continually had Outlook Performance issues when a user has the CRM Client enabled. We went from Outlook opening in less than a minute to it now taking 5-10min and then have the possibility for it hang again once users starting checking their main / looking at CRM data.

We contacted Microsoft when the issue first arose and were eventually told it would be resolved with subsequent rollups. We are now on Rollup 18 and performance has not increased. One thing to note is that reading the current documentation it states that heavily customised deployments will cause performance problems. I haven't however found an example of at what point a deployment is "heavily customised".

I have tried several solutions already ranging from modifying user and computer registry keys, enabling compression in IIS and pretty much anything I could find through searching forums.

My question is, what is everyone else's experience when using the CRM Outlook client and if you have had performance issues was there any solution?

Thanks,

Daniel Di Giandomenico

Environment: Citrix / Windows Server 2008R2 / Dynamics CRM 2011 UR18 / Office 2010

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Magor Kovacs 1,835 on at

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Hello Daniel,

Performance issues are notoriously hard to troubleshoot. Regarding ``heavy customizations´´, this is a rather nebulous term and it´s impossible to lay down a hard metrics system which would cathergorize how ´´heavily´´ a system is customized.

For the Outlook Client the main performance drivers are the amount of data synchronized and the views present. Meaning that the more complex the views are and the more data they have to retrieve, the slower the client will be.

We also need to factor in hardware, Outlook version and installed software which influences Outlook, such as anti-virus, company IT policies restricting bandwidth, filters, etc. etc.

All in all, some more information will be needed to troubleshoot the issue.

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Community Member on at

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Thanks for you response Magor,

Once Outlook and CRM has fully loaded performance seems to be okay. Its only during the opening of Outlook when its "Loading Profile" that it stops and takes a long time. Would data synchronisation and views affect this process or would that only be an issue when viewing the actual data once loaded?

I have seen many solutions for increasing performance while using Outlook but not necessarily how to increase performance when Outlook itself is opening. If you recommend looking into these a solution for this then I will investigate down this path.

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Joe Woltering 12,163 on at

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Any luck with this Daniel? We've traced our long loading times to the creation of two .sdf files under the Users Local Appdata folder. We're trying to see how to reduce this by redirecting the folder to a network share.

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Wayne Walton 13,730 on at

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Just to double-check, is the CRM Outlook Plugin also on UR 18?

Also, do you have any processes that are doing large updates to CRM records overnight? Something that might require CRM to re-check and re-sync records in the morning?

Are you running in offline mode with any users?

Is there any performance difference between users that have been configured for a long time, and those that have recently been set up?

Last ditch, is "don't close Outlook" and acceptable answer? ;)

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Joe Woltering 12,163 on at

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Even with a newly created user, it still creates the two .sdf files in the .../username/AppData/Local/Microsoft/MSCRM/client folder which are ~15Mb and 30Mb in size, respectively, during which time, Outlook is unusable.

"Last ditch, is "don't close Outlook" and acceptable answer? ;)"

Haha, no, but not using Dynamics CRM is certainly becoming a possibility.

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Wayne Walton 13,730 on at

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Joe, do you have roaming profiles in your organization? Those files should only be created the first time. I'm wondering if maybe it's not properly recognizing those files, or if your roaming profiles are set up to clear out the appdata folder.

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Community Member on at

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I am definitely still experiencing this issue. I have also noticed these files which in my case they are double. 33mb and 50mb.

We cant just not close Outlook either as we operate in Citrix environment with servers that reboot nightly.

EDIT: I have checked a few more of these files across our users. The first file that is {GUID}False.sdf averages around 22MB per user. The second file MetadataCache-{GUID}.sdf has ranged anywhere between 50MB and 94MB (so far).

How confident are we that the loading of these files is the cause?

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Magor Kovacs 1,835 on at

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Hello Guys,

Let me chip in here. The two .sdf files that are being created are the local SQL databases for the client. They are needed for the client to function. Since the client does not have a ``real time`` link to the server, what it does is pull the data from the server into it´s local database and work witht he local data.

Then a cyclical synchronization takes place (either/or automatic, manual).

Because this is how Microsoft programmed it, there is no way around the creation of the local databases.

Under normal circumstances, once the database is created, it´s only supposed to be updated and not completely recreated.

In case, for whatever reason the local DB has to be recreated, you can count on increased load time and reduced functionality while it is re-written.

Also, after some changes in UR 15, the client also caches customizations, etc. during startup.

In theory this is supposed to help navigation later on and it´s supposed to take a bit longer at startup but offer a smoother navigation.

Bottom line: longer load times after first startup is to be expected. But as to exactly how long that load time is supposed to be, it hinges on a lot of factors, chiefly on extent of customizations and amount of data to be synched.

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Magor Kovacs 1,835 on at

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Additional thoughts:

In case of roaming profiles or session based logons, it´s possible that the local .sdf files will be re-created by CRM after each session.

This will add a considerable amount to the first boot after each session.

In order to avoid this, Citrix should be configured to save and make the .sdf files available when a new session is started.

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Joe Woltering 12,163 on at

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We are in the same situation, where our provisioned servers reboot nightly, thus blowing away any local profiles.

So what we did was go back in time to 1997 and use a couple of logon/logoff scripts to copy these two files out to a network share and then back down again on logon. It seems to be working so far and I can verify that Outlook opens now almost immediately and without the 'sync' warning window. A frighteningly archaic solution but should do the job provided your network bandwidth can handle the copy in a timely manner.

You can find the basic format for the scripts in this post: community.dynamics.com/.../142085.aspx

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