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Why does my “Settings” area disappear during a demo of Microsoft CRM 3?

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I have only ever seen this to be an issue on one machine Virtual PC demo environments. But you are in Outlook and you want to show customizations, you open the Web Client and no customization area, and sometimes, no Settings area at all. Why you ask?

This is related to a caching issue with the sitemap.xml file, which controls the entire left-hand navigation and is generally common between the web client and the Outlook clients. The one exception is Settings, which is only available in the web client. If you start on the server with Outlook first and then open the web client, you may run in to this problem.

If you export the Site Map customizations and look at the file you will see that the Settings area is set to Client = “Web”. This means that the area will only appear in the CRM Web client. This is what is getting cached. When you open up the CRM Outlook Client the Sitemap settings say to not display the Settings button since it is only available in the CRM Web Client. (And please do try and change that, I am not sure what the ramifications are of doing that…)

You can fix this in a demo environment pretty easily.

  1. Make sure CRM Web and Outlook are closed completely
  2. Start | Run “Regedit”
  3. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient\
  4. Look for the ServerURL Key
  5. Change it to from https://localhost:5555/MSCRMServices to https://127.0.0.1:5555/MSCRMServices (The IP of the local machine)

Now you should be able to demo both at the same time with your settings appearing where they should in the Outlook client.

Thanks to Dana Martens for providing a easy fix for something that has been driving me nuts since the early days of 3.0’s VPCs… This is something that Anne Stanton and others have been talking about for a while. While this is not for use in production, it should work. (I have ONLY ever ran into this in my VPC environments.)

 

This post contains information about modifying the registry. Before you modify the registry, make sure to back it up and make sure that you understand how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For information about how to back up, restore, and edit the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

256986 (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/256986/) Description of the Microsoft Windows Registry

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2006
    This is actually a common problem for any user that uses both the Web & Outlook clients.  It is the result of a cookie that is written by the Outlook client.  Changing the URL causes the cookie to not be shared.

    Another option is to have 2 aliases for the CRM server, 1 that is used by the Outlook client and another that is used for the web client.  Different "name", differnt cookie.

    Matt

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2006
    Ben Vollmer tilts his lance at this issue I have seen asked many times and in many forums:
    "I have only...

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2006
    We have had the same problem occur periodically in VPC demos. Our solution has been to exit all the clients then clear the IE cache. Once, I had to tell IE to stop caching, but usually just clearing the cache has worked.

    Don Plaster, Compass Technology

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2006
    Don,
    That is what I used to do as well. But this makes clearing the cache not necessary... :-) I have not checked the latest image, but this is a change I wanted to make on it, but may have slipped. :-)
    Thanks for reading!
    Ben

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2006
    If this happens with Virtual Server, it can happen in production environments.

    Thanks for explaining.

    Achim

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2006
    Achim,
    It should not happen in production. This article is ONLY addressing the VPC and what happens with it. How often do you have both of them running on the same machine? In a production enviroment, we block installing CRM on the CRM server, so this should only happen in the VPC and outside of it IF you are running both at the same time, which your shouldn't be doing. :)

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2006
    I've got this problem on the clients in a test environment (but not VPC). If you have Outlook started then Settings does not appear in the Web client. Wierd!

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2006
    This is by design. You should not have both open at the same time.

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2006
    It was annoying enough that someone considered this to be a "by design" feature.  I'm on early days of implementation and finding myself wanting to flit between Outlook and "Settings" a lot; was this not foreseen as a common requirement?

    But now I'd just like to chip in my experience that it certainly does happen in a production environment.  I wish I'd been running it under Virtual PC, but it's my main working copy that's now denying me my access to "Settings" altogether.

    I've Restarted and done a full cold reboot and cleared IE's cache of Temporary Internet Files, I'm still not getting my "Settings" area in my CRM browser window.

  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2006
    I find it a bit strange that there is a limitation to using both clients at the same time.

    Despite good intentions on making both versions Outlook-like it is only true for the Web-version. The Outlook client menu is not very user friendly and many customers I have talked to complain (rightfully) that the webclient gives a lot more overview but they like the concept of working in Outlook.

    My current customer have decided to use the Web-client for most tasks but Outlook for booking meetings (since they can't see when they're free in the webclient). They havn't gone live yet but I fear they will have problems with the problem above. We will probably solve it using a new CNAME.

    Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

    Regards,
    Gustaf Westerlund, gustaf @ humandata.se

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 08, 2007
    I recently installed CRM 3.0 for a long time client. He's been bothered ever since with the issue of...

  • Anonymous
    November 08, 2007
    I read your other thread Larry.  In you update on the new install, you mention changing just the one reg entry. Instead of doing the regedit after the install, you can simply use the alternate CRM reference in the Outlook Client install itself- where it asks for the CRM server.  Works for us every time that way. HTH,

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2010
    hi , we are using ms crm 4.0 ,in that i have configures my sitemap file by commenting Settings area, and uploaded into crm , again if want to enable my settings means ..there is no settings area to upload the new sitemap file. So,what to do for this Problem.