I have been trying to setup my first CRM 2011 Beta On-Premises server and i have have resolved some glitches so thought about sharing that with the community.
Pre-Requisites:
1. Windows server 2008 R2
2. Make sure that you have active directory setup on your machine. If not then here is a very good series of articles that explains how to do that.
3. SQL Server 2008 along with reporting server is required for CRM 2011
4. IIS needs to be configured. Ensure that Url for reporting server is accessible
Installing CRM:
Based on the your machine please make sure that you get the right copy of CRM. Amd64 for 64-bit O.S. Once you have these things covered its time to go ahead with your installation. CRM 2011 On-Premises setup would guide you through the following steps. There should not be any issue doing this and most probably you will have your CRM up and running fairly quickly.
Outlook Client for CRM 2011:
As you look to install the outlook client which most of you would because it ceratinly is amongst the selling pitch for CRM 2011. Make sure that you have Microsoft Outlook 64 bit running for this to work. If not uninstall MIcrosoft Office and install the 64 bit version. If you have problems uninstalling please refer to this link.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301
Outlook client installation should be the same as your outlook meaning it should be x64 for x64 outlook. Once that is ensured I think you would be fine with rest of the installation. However i faced lots of issues with it and most of them are solved here.
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/crm2011beta/thread/c7affa77-41d7-462d-bbc6-cd8f540f7194
If you have outlook client for office 2010 configured and running then you are one lucky guy and befor you check it out you need to celebrate because its no small feat and YES i am not joking. If you are stuck here and you cant find any help even after looking at microsoft forums you have to try this.
1. Create a new profile as C. Bates mentioned in his post on the forum. It helps to solve problems in relationship to ids linked up with your profile.
2. Make sure you uninstall Windows Live 2011 if that is installed. I had it with my Windows 7 and it gave me all sort of problems. After that do install an earlier version and make sure that IDCRLVersion in registry is 6.x.x.
3. Unistall microsoft client for outlook and setpup outlook for your account profile.
4. Make sure you clean up regitry entries.
5. Install client again and then try to configure your CRM 2011 client. Now it should work fine.
6. If you have problems again maybe you just need to create a clean profile and install again but this should normally make it work.
7. Logs and Trace files are available so review them for errors in case you have any.
I hope this helps.
