Slow forms? Try Update Rollup 5!

Posted by Kara O'Brien on August 3, 2009  |  Comments (0)

Last month, Microsoft released Update Rollup 5 (UR5) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Many of our customers have upgraded already, and if you’re experiencing slow performance on any Dynamics CRM 4.0 forms – particularly those with a lot of attributes – UR5 includes a design change that might help. In the update, the form load process was optimized by removing unnecessary code used to compile the dynamic data fields used in workflows and templates, leading to a greatly improved load time for forms! For more details, check out Alex’s post on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog.

For a complete list of fixes included in UR5, as well as links to the previous four rollups, see the Microsoft Support website.  Note there are a few manual updates and configuration changes included in UR5, also detailed in the Support article.

Unsupported changes (if you’ve dared to make them!) to core Dynamics CRM 4.0 code are skipped when UR5 is applied. This means your custom changes aren’t lost (good) but currently there’s no log to identify which files were skipped (bad). If you’ve made unsupported changes to the HTC, JS, XML or other core Dynamics CRM 4.0 code, grab the latest code in UR5 and manually merge your changes to them to ensure you have all of the updates included in UR5. Hopefully logging will be included in UR6 to make this process easier!

Like all update rollup releases, UR5 is inclusive of the previous Dynamics CRM 4.0 rollups released by Microsoft, so if you have not updated your system recently, all released fixes will be applied with UR5. Also note that the rollups are not included in the latest installation files for Dynamics CRM 4.0, so if you’re bringing up a new environment, make sure to download the latest update rollup after installing the software. As always, test the update in a development or staging environment before installing the rollup in your production environment if possible.

The update also is on schedule with the 8-week release cycle Microsoft announced in January, which means we expect Update Rollup 6 to be released in September. Stay tuned for details!