Google Desktop vs. Microsoft CRM: Part 2

Posted by Mike Snyder on February 15, 2006  |  Comments (0)

Yesterday, we reviewed a known minor issue that Google Desktop causes with Microsoft CRM when it removes the header background color on intial launch.

We recently discovered a new issue that Google Desktop causes with Microsoft CRM and we want to post our learnings in case someone else bumps into the same problem. When we launch a new session of Microsoft CRM on a computer running Google Desktop, the CRM Internet Explorer window will temporarily lock up. After a minute or two (sometimes longer), the window returns to normal and behaves just fine for the rest of the session. If you view the Task Manager during the lock up period (when CRM is launching) you'll see that the CPU usage spikes up and then returns to normal.

What made this behavior really strange is that the browser only locked up for some of our Microsoft CRM 3.0 websites, but not all of them. We noticed that the lockup was particularly bad for our live production install of Microsoft CRM but we did not see any performance issues when we launched our demo/development installations.

Fortunately, we eventually determined the unique set of circumstances that caused this window lockup behavior:

• Google Desktop installed and running on client computer
• The default start page (change under Tools -> Options) is set to a view that contains a large number of records (approximately more than 100 records)

The reason we never saw this problem on the demo/dev environments is that the default start page was set to a "My Activities View" and that view didn't contain any records! However, when we logged into our production CRM there are lots of activities and records because we're actually using it!

After playing with Google Desktop some more, we were able to eliminate the CRM window lockup by doing either of the following:

• Disable Google Desktop Search
• Exclude Web History from the Google Desktop Search Types (located under Preferences)

Since we wanted to use those features, turning them off wasn't a good solution for us...but it did clearly confirm that Google Desktop caused the performance problem.

As a workaround for the problem if you want to continue using Google Desktop Search, we would recommend one of the following solutions:

• Set the default Start Page (and the default View) so that it only displays a few records
• Change the Records Per Page to a lower number like 25