Microsoft Certification FAQ

This morning I've been tweeted the following link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2009/08/12/microsoft-dynamics-certification-faq.aspx

It's a FAQ containing lots of info regarding the Microsoft Certification Exams in CRM.

If you're still planning to get certified, it might be worth the read. Good luck !

#MB2-631 - Three's a Charm!

And there goes the third exam, passed with a whoppingly good result. Easy? Ohhh yes, especially after the Applications one. This must have been the easiest of the three. The questions are much more straightforward than the ones in the other two exams, and they do test you on the obvious things rather than on the footnotes and the impossible exceptions. So even as you're reading the questions, you can already tell what the answer is, sometimes through common sense more than through studying. But do not let this blog post fool you - you still need to know the ins and outs of the Customisation and Configuration training material and it wouldn't hurt to know your way around Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 either. I think I can easily say that the material in this blog covers about 90% of the exam questions. The rest I'm not sure, there were a couple of tricky ones (there always are).

Well, that's it for this blog for the moment. I might add to it at a later stage if I feel there is some information that could improve the content. I hope the blog posts help you as much as they helped me while studying. Good luck in your CRM exams.

More Deployment Manager capabilities

So far we've seen that the Deployment Manager can be used to create organisations from scratch, to import existing organisations from another CRM installation and to grant/revoke the deployment administrator role to active directory users.

However, the capabilities of the Deployment Manager reach further than that. It can be used to perform the following tasks as well:
1. Disable/enable organisations - to make an organisation unavailable for users eg. for a scheduled maintenance period
2. Deleting an organisation - a disabled organisation can be deleted from the Deployment Manager, which removes it from the configuration database. It is NOT removed from the SQL Server database. The user will need to remove the database manually using SQL Server tools.
3. Reconnecting the CRM server to a restored database.
4. Display the status of the CRM servers.
5. Allow administrators to take the CRM servers online or offline using the Server Manager tool.
6. Add/View/Remove licenses from a deployment using the License Tool.
7. Upgrade a trial license using the License Tool.

Deployment Administrators

To run Deployment Manager, you must have the Deployment Administrator role. Users installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 automatically have this role assigned to them, and in turn, they can assign it to other active directory users.

A Deployment Administrator can perform all deployment-related tasks in CRM, such as creating organisations, disabling servers etc. This role does not grant a user access to CRM, and in fact does not consume a license. As a result it cannot be managed through the CRM client applications.

The Deployment Administrator role is granted or removed in the Deployment Administrators node in Deployment Manager.

Creating and Importing Additional Organisations

You can create and maintain more than one organisation in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise Edition. Upon installation, the user is asked for the details of the first organisation, but further to that, more organisations can be created through the Deployment Manager.

Alternatively you can add an organisation from another CRM installation by exporting and importing it into an existing CRM database, again through the Deployment Manager's Organisation tools. When performing an import, you need to take care to move the respective Active Directory (AD) information as well, by decoupling from the old AD information and recoupling with the AD information on the new installation. This is not a problem as the Import Organisation Wizard provides the ability to map all Active Directory Microsoft Dynamics CRM users from the source installation to valid Active Directory users in the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM installation. The Import Organisation Wizard will also update all primary and foreign keys to reflect the new environment and import all related reports.

You can choose to map users through either of 4 options:
1. Keep current users mapping
2. Manually map users
3. Generate new mapping file
4. Auto-map users based on the following parameters:
- Active Directory Account Name
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Full Name to Active Directory Full Name
- Prefix and a start value
- An existing mapping file


Users can only access one organisation at a time, whether they are using the Web application or whether they are accessing Microsoft Dynamics CRM through Outlook.