Grant Holliday

Recently I had a discussion about deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 in an Enterprise. This is something I’ve never done on a large scale, but I do have some familiarilty with how CRM hangs together.

Some questions to consider:

• How would your Exchange Administrators react if you told them that “I just need to install this component on your production Exchange server”
• Then tell them “oh, btw, it can’t be an Exchange 2007 server - it has to be an Exchange 2003 server”
• How would your Active Directory administrators react if you told them “I just need to run this installer as domain admin, it just needs to add some OU’s and things.”
• How would your SQL DBAs react if you told them “The installer requires a default instance of SQL”
• What would you think if when you needed to size / scale a CRM installation you couldn’t just look up a ‘best practices’ document and you had to talk to Product Support Services (PSS) and let them size it for you.

With these questions in mind, I decided to do a little digging and found out most of the answers out on CRM blogs. See the following posts for more information:

• Installing Microsoft CRM 3.0 at Microsoft (Part 1)
• Installing Microsoft CRM 3.0 at Microsoft (Part 2)
• Installing Microsoft CRM 3.0 at Microsoft (Part 3)
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the Exchange Administrator
• Large Scale CRM Deployments & Scalability Benchmarks
• Large Scale CRM Deployments & Scalability Benchmarks…continued
• Microsoft CRM support for SQL Server Named Instances
• CRM E-Mail Router Update to support Exchange 2007 Mailboxes (but can’t actually be installed on E2007)
• KB930140 : Workaround to create CRM routing rules manually

I hope this helps somebody.