Does Dynamics CRM REALLY Work with IE 8?
I recently upgraded my laptop from Windows XP to Windows 7, and overall my experience has been almost as good as that of the people in the “My Idea” campaign. The task bar, for example, really IS a nice feature. And it takes my laptop about 30 seconds to start up now, down from about 10 minutes at the end of its XP life.
But I’m a CRM guy, and I spend about three quarters of my online time working with Dynamics CRM. And since the native client is Internet Explorer, my real acid test is how well the Dynamics CRM experience is delivered through Internet Explorer. Even more specifically, just in case it matters, here’s what I run:
- Dynamics CRM Online
- Internet Explorer 8
My experience has not been a good one, and being a relatively savvy user of Dynamics CRM, I’m getting a little nervous about supporting clients with this configuration.
Integration scenarios like this are hard to test and hard to troubleshoot, but here’s a summary of the problems I’ve experienced:
- Running IE 8 in Windows 7 is much more annoying than my Windows XP experience, mainly because of the constant nagging about popups. I turn my speakers off on a regular basis but Windows 7 always seems to turn them back on. This problem is more an annoyance than anything else, but still, it would be nice if I could make it go away.
- More serious is that sometimes a difficult to troubleshoot combination of factors renders CRM inaccessible. For example, currently I need to access one of the many Dynamics CRM Online organizations I’m associated with. I’m signed in with my Windows Live ID and get as far as a form like this one:
I can follow instructions as well as the next guy, so I click the Go button. What happens next? You guessed it: I return to the same screen, no matter how many times I click Go. (and today is 2/22, btw, so it’s not the scheduled maintenance. My guess is this has something to do with a combination of settings for Trusted Sites (of which this site is one) and the Popup Blocker (for which this site has it turned off).
- Even worse, there’s another combination of settings that will cause your sign-in form to call itself repeatedly, endlessly flickering away. The novelty wears off quickly, and when that happens, you also cannot access the Dynamics CRM organization you’re trying to get to. When I first encountered this particular problem I assumed it was because of some egregious mistake I was making (after all, I’d read all the articles saying how great Dynamics CRM was in IE 8!), so I’d tweak a few settings, maybe turn off the popup blocker, reboot, and find my way back in to the CRM org I needed to get to. But recently I’ve been working on a project with Martin Donnelly, who is way smarter than I am, and he encountered the same issue (he’s running Vista). I felt better about myself after that, but it made me even more nervous about the prospect of supporting customers!
Dynamics CRM Online is a fantastic product; in most ways it sets the standard for how cloud CRM should work. But dependence for its UI on your OS/browser combination has its costs, and the fact that it sometimes doesn’t work and is difficult to troubleshoot when it doesn’t is a big one. If you’ve got the magic bullet IE 8 settings for these issues, please let me know and I’ll add you along with Martin Donnelly to the smarter-than-Richard category and head off some customer-satisfaction issues in the same go!
Brought to you by Richard Knudson and IMG.
Matt Cooper Said,
February 22, 2010 @ 8:32 am
Hi Richard. I’m a program manger for CRM Online, and one of our partners forwarded a link to this post over to me. First of all, let me say that I’m really sorry you’re having trouble with CRM Online! Obviously this isn’t the experience we want you (or anyone) to have.
As part of the engineering team responsible for the sign-in experience and Windows Live ID integration, I take these apparent bugs quite seriously. Can I enlist your help in getting to the bottom of them? If so, please shoot me an email at the address I submitted with this comment so I can ask a few follow-up questions.
Thanks, and I hope the rest of your experience with CRM Online has been great. (If not, again, please shoot me an email!)
Thanks,
Matt
Richard Knudson Said,
February 22, 2010 @ 1:21 pm
Hi Matt — I don’t write articles like that as a backdoor way of getting special attention from product managers, but it never surprises me when that’s the result! And yes, absolutely. I’ll e-mail you separately and when we get the settings figured out, I’ll post a followup note up here.
Thanks for your responsiveness, and yes, my overall experience has been excellent. As I said, CRM Online sets the standard for cloud CRM, so it’s always surprising when I come across something that needs a little work!
Richard
Frederic Tarasevicius Said,
February 23, 2010 @ 12:16 pm
I look forward to your follow up, we use CRM online with Win7 and IE8 and we do not have the same troubles you are facing.
We have to disable IE Protected Mode, disable the popup blocker and add CRM to the trusted sites. This seems to resolve all of our issues.
Do you use the Outlook Integration or just the web browser based CRM?
Richard Knudson Said,
February 23, 2010 @ 1:19 pm
Hi Frederic — I appreciate the comment. When you say “disable the popup blocker” do you mean disable it for ALL sites, or just disable it for the specific CRM sites from the Privacy tab? And do you ever get the yellow “Internet Explorer has blocked this site from using an activeX control in an unsafe manner…” warning to go away entirely?
Thanks!
Natasha Said,
March 18, 2010 @ 3:30 pm
So……what ended up happening with Matt? I have also been experiencing a lot of bugginess for client systems that is making me very uncomfortable….
Richard Knudson Said,
March 18, 2010 @ 4:22 pm
Hi Natasha,
Actually, I had a very instructive conversation with Matt and wrote up the results in a subsequent post: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2010/02/25/crmonline-ie8-yes/
My experience has been that if you follow those steps, it works flawlessly. Let me know what you think, and thanks for reading.
Mercedes Said,
June 10, 2010 @ 1:19 pm
We don’t use CRM Online as we house our CRM server inhouse. I cannot get CRM to even function at all on IE 8. I’ve disabled EVERYTHING possible in IE 8 and still it will not work (try to open web client and keep getting MS Dynamics CRM window was unable to open and mentioned popup blocker settings, but I don’t even have the popup blocker enabled.
I am the system admin at our company and it looks like after wasting 4 hours of my afternoon trying to get CRM to work with IE 8 (worked fine in the AM when I was running IE 7), I am going to have to try and revert back to IE 7.
Good times!
You would think that the latest version of MICROSOFT crm would support the latest version of MICROSOFT browser. Do you guys not test your own applications together before releasing?
Richard Knudson Said,
June 14, 2010 @ 8:10 am
Hi Mercedes,
Thanks for your note. I’m sorry you’re having trouble getting it all to work. As I mentioned in this post — http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2010/02/25/crmonline-ie8-yes/ — I did get it working fine after following those step-by-step instructions. I’ve also talked to a few other folks who have had success with those as well and have been working with my clients.
Richard