CRM vendor advices
I have an intranet-based CRM application that I'm customizing. The
application uses business objects running in the COM+ Services app on the
IIS server. I need to be able to communicate with these objects from a
client machine. Basically, I've built an ActiveX control that is loaded in
one of the CRM app's ASP pages. When the user clicks a button on the page,
my ActiveX control ( a VB6 ActiveX DLL) is called and passed in some values.
The control takes those values and passes them to the COM+ objects which
return XML data. The ActiveX control then parses the XML using XSL and opens
a new Outlook message on the client machine using
CreateObject("Outlook.Application") and puts data in the body of the message
for the user to review, edit if needed, and send off.
The CRM vendor tells me I can talk to their objects using
CreateObject(ObjectName.MethodName, RemoteServerName) but it does not work
on my client machines. My code works great on my workstation where I have
VB6 and the proxy objects for the CRM objects, but on the clients, I click
the button on the page and nothing happens, not even an error message. Does
anyone have any suggestions for where to start troubleshooting?
Could you fit any more acronyms in this paragraph? This is not
a job interview.
It sounds like you might need to configure DCOM for your CRM objects. Under
W2K, this would be via the dcomcnfg utility, but I believe XP has a
control-panel interface.
Each IIS thread impersonates the client it's currently handling. When you
try to instantiate a remote class and/or access an instance of a remote
class, you may have 2 problems:
1) In what account is the remote DCOM server instantiated By default, I
think a separate copy is invoked for each distinct client account, but
dcomcnfg can start it in a specific, possibly-different account. Whether you
want this depends on whether the DCOM server is multi-threaded, and whether
it then intends to access other system resources (e.g. files, tables, OLAP
cubes, etc)
2) If an instance of the DCOM server is already running, what client
accounts are allowed to access its classes. This is also configurable with
dcomcnfg.