How to Identify AD Groups for CRM Organization

Each organization within MS CRM, will have there own set of unique groups within active directory. You can either pre-create these groups or allow the "Deployment Manager" to create these as part of the creation process.

Regardless which option you use, you should have the following 3 groups:

• SqlAccessGroup
• PrivReportingGroup
• ReportingGroup

Eventually you will discover that active directory will soon become overun with these groups and it can become difficult to identify which groupds are associated with which CRM organization.

Being able to identify these groups is very useful when investigating permissions and security related issues. You can use a simple SQL query against the "Organization_MSCRM" database.

select ReportingGroupName, SqlAccessGroupName, PrivReportingGroupName from Organization

MS CRM - Sandbox Timeout

MS Dynamics CRM imposes several limitations and restrictions to all plugins registered to operate within the CRM Sandbox. 

The most common pitfall experienced by developers is the Sandbox Timeout, which by default is set to 2 minutes. Any business logic that executes longer than this will result in a exception e.g:

• 0x80044172; message: The plug-in execution failed because the operation has timed-out at the Sandbox Host

• 0x80044171; message: The plug-in execution failed because the operation has timed-out at the Sandbox Client

In order to increase the timeout period, there are several registry settings below which can be used as follows:

• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSCRM\SandboxClientOperationTimeoutInSec
• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSCRM\SandboxHostOperationTimeoutInSec
• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSCRM\SandboxWorkerOperationTimeoutInSec

The screenshot below shows the three registry settings, by default they are all set to 120 seconds (2 minutes). Changing these settings can be used to either decrease or increase the sandbox timeout.