Provisioning CRM Online Via The Office 365 Microsoft Online Portal
War At 33 1/3…
Just before Christmas, I helped one of my customers sign up and purchase a small CRM Online development environment for their project starting in the new year. As I mentioned in a previous post, customer 30-day trials are not yet up and running on the new Microsoft Online Portal (MOP)administration, billing & provisioning platform, but for new customer purchases by credit card or invoice, you can use the following URL to sign-up for an account with CRM Online already loaded into your shopping cart: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/Signup/MainSignUp.aspx?OfferId=E778C9B9-48BE-4a95-A2D9-AA43F828ED0C&dl=CRMSTANDARD.
If you already have a MOP account for Office 365, then you should not use this URL as CRM Online will already be available for you to purchase from your list of available subscriptions.
Anyhow, back to the sign-up process. Clicking on the link takes you a sign-up page where you need to fill in a few details. The most important choices are the “Organisation Name” and “Domain Name”. Once created, you will not be able to change these, so make sure you choose carefully.
The new user ID you create as part of the sign-up process will be assigned the global administrator role within MOP, so it is important that you make sure you select a strong password, and that access to this user is restricted within your organisation. You can of course create multiple administrators, and MOP provides several different administrator roles so that you can be quite granular in the permissions you assign:
- Global Administrator
- Billing Administrator
- User Management Administrator
- Password Administrator
- Service Administrator
You can find a full definition of each role is available here - https://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/ff637584.aspx. I recommend you spend some time understanding this so that you have the correct number of users assigned to each role. At the very least, you are probably going to want to have two Global Administrators (in case you lose/forget one of the passwords), plus a handful of User Management Administrators and Password Administrators.
Anyway, back to my customer. After spending a couple of minutes signing up and logging in to https://portal.microsoftonline.com with our first Global Administrator user, we decided to create a second MOP user to be the CRM Online administrator, assigning them the Service Administrator role. Once done, we logged in as this new user and completed the CRM Online purchase. All went as expected, and within a few more minutes we received the familiar message “Setting up Dynamics CRM Online… this may take a few minutes”.
So we waited, and waited, then waited some more. By this time it was Christmas, so we left it running only to find the same message when we returned in the New Year.
After a quick call to Microsoft Support, it transpires that the user who purchases the CRM Online subscription must be assigned either a Billing or Global Administrator role in order for the provisioning process to complete. After making this change within MOP and waiting a little longer (not sure exactly how long as I decided to go for some lunch), I returned to find CRM Online up and running. I guess this is the kind of “teething trouble” you get when you are on the cutting-edge of CRM technology.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.