Microsoft CRM 4.0 and SQL 2008

The other day I installed Microsoft CRM 4.0 using SQL 2008. I wanted to start using the Microsoft SQL 2008 BI tools to demonstrate a true CRM analytical solution. I also wanted to create multiple CRM Organisations so that I could develop a number of vertical solutions for future Microsoft CRM demos.

Microsoft CRM installed beautifully and all was up and working within the hour. Then I went to create a new organisation in the Deployment Manager and ran into this error halfway through the install: “The specified path is not a metabase path” I was fairly sure it had something to do with SQL 2008 and Reporting Services and some investigation on the web proved me right. It turns out that because Reporting Services no longer using IIS, Microsoft CRM was falling over when it went to validate the Reporting Services URL. In order to get past the error you need to create a website in IIS on your Reporting Services server that matches the URL and port as specified in the Reporting Services Configuration Manager. This solution and other issues with SQL 2008 and Microsoft CRM 4.0 are described in more detail in a knowledgebase article which can be found here.

As an aside I was hoping that Roll up 1 for Microsoft CRM 4.0 would resolve this issue but no luck!