The comments do not appear to be working on the CRM team blog, so I wanted to post this here for anyone else that might be having the same struggle that we did. The error message we were facing during auto-update of the CRM Outlook Client was:
Installation package for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for Microsoft Office Outlook cannot be found. Try the installation with a valid copy of the installation package ‘Client.msi’
The installation package for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Update Rollup 4 for the Outlook client has code that looks for the original installation path of the client. When it cannot find the “client.msi” file in the location stored in the registry it will throw an error.
In our case, the original installation was performed from a CD-ROM, which was recorded in the registry as the path. Obviously, the CD was not left in the drives, and so that path was invalid. Either through a manual installation or an auto-update through the Outlook add-in an error was thrown at the point when the update attempts to access the original installation package.
If you are running the update package manually you have the opportunity to find the file and continue the update. If you are running the update package by way of the auto-update procedure the process will error out, and you will not have the ability to find the file and continue.
We managed to solve the problem with the missing “client.msi” for our auto-update users by pushing out a registry update (by way of group policy) that sets the original installation path for the client.msi file to a shared network drive that all users had access to.
This fix prevented the missing file error and allowed the update to continue. It also prevented manual installation from forcing users to find the file.
The registry entry was found under:
Because this fix involves editing the registry, I have to reiterate the warnings given by Microsoft: Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs.
Hope that helps. It isn’t the most elegant solution, but it worked for us.