Dynamics CRM 2013 breaks Compatibility with Microsoft’s own ClickOnce technology
Why, and what you can do to work around the problem
The underlying HTML for Dynamics CRM 2013 has dramatically changed from version 2011 to version 2013. Most noticeably of course is the user interface itself.
The strange break in compatibility
If your OS is Windows 7 or Windows XP and you are using Internet Explorer to access your CRM 2013 system, you will notice that nothing happens if you try to launch a ClickOnce application from an entity ribbon or other button pointing to the external application.
If you take a look “behind the scenes” on the server hosting the clickOnce application, you will notice that the requests for the .application file results in a “206 Partial Content” response in stead of the expected “200 OK” response.
Strangely it only happens if you use Internet Explorer and not other browsers like FireFox or Chrome.
Microsoft confirms the problem
Microsoft Support, their IE Team and their CRM team has spent time since november 2013 looking at this problem, but other than confirming it to be a problem, they have not been able to figure out what makes this problem surface in CRM 2013.
Working around the problem
Microsoft Support does not offer any solution to this problem, or any promise or timeframe for fixing it, so as of writing time of this article, the conclusion is that:
Dynamics CRM 2013 does not support launching Microsoft ClickOnce applications when Internet Explorer is used as the browser.
Adjusting Internet Explorer to support ClickOnce applications
If you cannot use another browser, you need to tweak a some settings in your Internet Explorer to make ClickOnce applications launchable from CRM 2013.
- Go to Tools → Internet Options and select the tab Security
- Select the icon Trusted Sites and press the button Sites
- Add the website where the ClickOnce application is hosted, to the list of trusted sites and press Close
- Slide the Security Level down to “Medium-Low” security
- Press OK to close the options dialog
The procedure above must be completed for every user that has to activate the ClickOnce application in CRM 2013.
