Today I spent some time looking for a solution to automate upgrading CRM 3.0 clients to 4.0 and finally found something that seemed to work, most of it here: http://tinyurl.com/luwcty

Since there were no laptop/offline clients, I used the next command, straight from the install CD (ISO):

msiexec /x lightclient.msi /qn

This didn’t work at first, because Outlook was running. This took care of that in an effective, but not so subtle way:

taskkill /F /IM Outlook.exe

After that I installed the 4.0 client, using:

SetupClient.exe /q /targetdir "c:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM" INSTALLLEVEL=2 /l c:\CRM_Client_Install.txt

Again straight from the CD/ISO.

The next step was to automate configuration of the client. This can be done by:

cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM\Client\ConfigWizard"
Microsoft.Crm.Client.Config.exe /Q /config Client_Config.xml /l c:\CRM_Client_Config.txt

My Client_Config.xml looked like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<CRMConfiguration>
  <Client>
    <ServerUrl Type="OnPremise" ShowUser="True">http://crmserver</ServerUrl>
    <Organization>Avadata</Organization>
    <CEIP option="False" />
    <Database Reuseexisting="False"/>   
  </Client>
</CRMConfiguration>

It was pretty easy to create this by looking at the Default_Client_Config.xml that comes with the CD.

The next step is to combine this in a script for SCCM or SMS, but someone else will be doing this, so I just tested the automatic steps manually :) According to the forum thread by Bruce Taylor2 some pauses are required to make a scripted version run smooth, due to the asynchronous behavior of the applications used.