Microsoft CRM 3.0 Client Refresh Released

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Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine...

Good news always travels fast, and as many of my fellow CRM bloggers have reported the CRM 3.0 Outlook Client Refresh (affectionately known internally as V3C) has been released to the web, and you can download it here.

The main focus of this release was to provide full support for Windows Vista and Office 2007, and the complete list of Windows & Office versions supported is as follows.

Windows:

  • Windows 2000 SP4
  • Windows XP SP2
  • Windows Vista

Office:

  • Office XP SP3 (with Windows 2000 and XP only)
  • Office 2003 SP2
  • Office 2007

As well as the obvious integration with the Outlook 2007 "ribbon", there are several structural changes, such as the use of SQL 2005 Express Edition in place of MSDE 2000 (Vista does not support MSDE), and the inclusion of all existing client hotfixes, which means you do not have to install the Update roll-up 1 package we released a couple of weeks ago. Another interesting development is the use of a custom MAPI store in place of the mscrm.pst file, which makes this more palatable to customers who block the use of .pst files for security and compliance reasons - I have come across at least one customer for whom this was a major issue.

Today’s release is only for English, but all other languages are already undergoing localisation testing and will be released in waves beginning in January, with an updated set of scripts for Terminal Server deployment released in early-January and an update to the Exchange E-mail Connector (including the Rule Deployment Wizard) for Exchange 2007 compatibility also in early-January.

Finally, for those of you who need that extra level of detail the buid version is 3.0.5300.1361. As always, you can check which version of the media you have by using Notepad to edit the \sql\2.0\versionstamp.sql file on the CRM Client CD and look for the following lines:

set @buildnumber = 5300
set @MajorVersion = 3
set @MinorVersion = 0
set @Revision = 1361

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.