Today marked the first day of Microsoft Dynamics SL 6.5 in the wild at work.  Once the final bugs are worked out, I plan on writing up the entire process, what we could have done better, and general gripes of the experience.

SMS 2003 failed me late last night — failing to push out the installation package for Dynamics to any of my test group.  After getting the go-ahead to go live a little after 5pm, I had a few hours to work with SMS for deployment of 6.5.  Had it been possible for 6.5 and 5.0 (Solomon) to run concurrently, this would have been less of an issue, and presumably the DLL hell that Microsoft lives in had much to do with the concurrency problem. I set up a test group of IT computer to push out my Wise install of 6.5 which included an uninstaller for 5.0.  The package itself worked beautifully: it modified Solomon.ini to point to the new SQL server and to the new database, installed shortcuts in the Start Menu that pointed to our network share, and also put a shortcut on “All Users” desktop so that no matter who was logged in, there would be no question of “where is Solomon (Dynamics)?”  

As proud as I was of the installer, I was whole-heartedly disappointed in my efforts to work with SMS.  I’ve used it in the past, minimally, to push out Office 2003 applications and with much success. While the SMS console reported receiving the package for distribution and that it copied the package to the distribution share, which I verified, it would never run the installer for any of the client PCs in my test group.  I even changed the option to have it copy the installer to the workstation, but that didn’t change anything.   

Even though the advertisement is still running at this very moment, I’m confident that the success/failure columns of the advertisement are still completely blank.I now have a plan to attempt to work with SMS 2007 before we complete our Data Domain upgrade.