I can now proudly announce that we will have the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM VPC available for download in a few days and as a bonus we decided to extend the current May VPC so our ISV's will have a little bit more time to create new DIF files and such. I hope to provide a download location ASAP. The VPC image when extracted is 7 GIG's and zipped it is only 2.2 GIG's.

As you can recall I asked for your input in one of my previous postings. Now what can you expect on the new image? Well due to the fact our fiscal year ends when also our image expires we had some challenges in getting the right people work on the image. This has resulted in a pretty slick, fast but "empty" image. We will create a differencing disk to have more funky stuff.

VPC Content
Windows 2003 Server R2 (SP2)
Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Internet Explorer 7
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 (V3C and Rollup 2)
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Laptop and Desktop Client
Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK (C:\CRM Tools\SDK)
Microsoft Dynamics Web Parts in http://intranet and http://extranet (not configured)
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Windows Desktop Search 3.01
POP3 Services (No Exchange)

The installation is done as described in the implementation guide. Installation was done with an account called crmadmin with the well known password.

Organization name:Contoso
Installation directory: C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM
Web site: Setup will use Web site Microsoft CRM Web Site (/LM/W3SVC/53604108 :5555:)
Web site location: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\CRM
Reporting Services Report Server: Setup will connect to the existing Reporting Services Report Server http://ds-srv-01/reportserver
SQL server: DS-SRV-01
Organizational unit: CRM (OU=CRM,DC=contoso,DC=com)
Security account for Microsoft CRM services: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
Security account for the ASP.NET service: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
Incoming Microsoft Exchange server: Default
Outgoing SMTP server: Default

After installation I applied a host header, changed the default port to 80 and you can access Microsoft Dynamics CRM through http://crm

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 is provisioned with fresh sample data from the Sample Data wizard which you find on the CRM server disc. I migrated the existing CRM customizations, but fixed the quick create error. Also the workflow rules were migrated and fixed.

I managed to get some really cool examples in the image:

• I installed the updated caching tool from Joris Kalz and I installed Joris's custom search tool that is embedded as a "custom search" within Microsoft Dynamics CRM but it's also added into the IE7 search providers list.
• I loved Matt Wittemann's example on the CRM Team blog. This example is now embedded in the account entity with a new tab called documents. We customized it a little so it will create a folder when saving your account.
• OpenXML..uh what is that? Well it is great way to create documents through Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Something Michael Höhne showed on his blog. I embedded his example on the accounts, quote and invoice entities.

I want to thank Matt Wittemann, Michael Höhne and Joris Kalz for all their help and efforts. I want to thank Greg Nichols in providing me the IE7 patch, Michael Rich for doing the legal stuff and last but certainly not the least I want to thank Arleigh Taylor for providing a great base image and Ronald Beekelaar for optimizing it.