MrDave's (David Yack) CRM Blog!

One of the things that always drove me crazy with CRM 3 was when I had a problem and tracked it down only to find out there was a hotfix available.  Further, to get that hot fix I had to call up support and request the update.  Along the way, you would end up with 5-10 hot fixes that were required anytime you installed a client or server.  That became a headache real quick. Sure, there was a rollup for CRM 3 but there wasn’t a plan to keep the pace matching the users needs.  Microsoft heard that and with CRM 4 they have been doing Update Rollup’s on a regular scheduled basis.

Update Rollup’s are released every couple months and contain a set of by the Microsoft CRM Sustained Engineering team.  This was announced back in January here and has continued on with Update Rollup 6 being the current released rollup.  This doesn’t mean that you won’t ever need a hotfix, but it should reduce the need to manage as many special hotfixes. 

One thing I like a lot is you can choose how to introduce the rollup’s into your environment as it makes sense.  Some companies will apply the rollup as soon as it is released from Microsoft, while others might wait a quarter or only apply it if they have problems.  Each of the rollup’s are also broken out into client and server and other components.

Each Rollup has a KB article that details what was changed

• Rollup 1 - http://support.microsoft.com/Kb/952858
• Rollup 2 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959419
• Rollup 3 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961768
• Rollup 4 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968176
• Rollup 5 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970141
• Rollup 6 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970148

Now don’t worry if you haven’t been rolling up there’s no need to go through each rollup you can jump straight to rollup 6 and start from there.  The prior rollup’s are not prerequisites.

CRM MVP Frank Lee also has a good blog post talking about approaches and good practices for deploying update rollups that you can read here.

So what do you think of the rollup’s?  Are they working for you?  What would you like different?