Hosted CRM 4.0 in an HMC4.5 environment
This blog is in English, normally I blog in Dutch but since Hosted CRM is used throughout the world I figured that an English blog is more useful ;-). Please note that I am *not* a Microsoft CRM 4 consultant, I am working primarily on Exchange Server and happened to stumble into CRM4 for one of my customers. I have been troubleshooting some time and did some advance Google and Bing searches before I figured out what was going on…. There might be better and faster solutions, but this is what I have done to get it working….
I have built two Hosted CRM environments, one in my test environment, one in a production environment. Both were installed into an existing HMC4.5 environment. The hosted CRM solution (Microsoft CRM 4) is installed using the following documents and software:
- HostedCRMProvisioning_i386.exe
- HostedCRMProvisioningDocumentation
These can be found on the Microsoft download pages
The installation itself is pretty straightforward; I have used a dedicated SQL Server for CRM, one CRM application server (the one the clients connect to) and one deployment server. As long as you follow the instruction in the document you’re fine. When you create the organization in the CRM application (you’ve already created the organization in the HMC environment!) you have to pay attention, write down the ‘uniqueName’ tag in the XML file since you need this in a later phase!
You’ll find this in the CreateOrganization.xml which can be found in the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Hosting\Provisioning\Samples\Hosted CRM” directory, this is an example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<request>
<data>
<organization>LDAP://OU=Mannen,OU=Hosting,DC=hmc45,DC=local</organization> <preferredDomainController>AD01.hmc.local</preferredDomainController> <baseCurrencyName>Euro</baseCurrencyName>
<baseCurrencyCode>EUR</baseCurrencyCode>
<baseCurrencySymbol>E</baseCurrencySymbol>
<organizationState>Enabled</organizationState>
<configDatabaseServer>hv-crmsql01</configDatabaseServer>
<friendlyOrganizationName>HC</friendlyOrganizationName>
<uniqueName>Hostingmannen</uniqueName>
</data>
<procedure>
<execute namespace="Hosted CRM" procedure="CreateOrganization" impersonate="1">
<executeData/>
<before source="data" destination="executeData" mode="merge" />
<after source="executeData" destination="data" mode="merge" />
</execute>
</procedure>
</request>
When you’ve created the user, it’s mailbox and the organization in CRM you’re ready to test. Use http://localhost on the CRM Server or http://crmserver on every other internal machine. You should be access the CRM Server and see the CRM application:
The next step is to have the CRM application available from the Internet. CRM makes a distinction between an internal network (where NTLM is used for authentication) and external network where forms-based authentication is used, comparable to the Outlook Web Access logon page. The abbreviation IFD (Internet Facing Domain) is used here.
Microsoft has a tool available to configure the IFD settings. The tool is called CRM4IFDTool and can be downloaded from the Microsoft website (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948779). Download the tool on the CRM server and expand it to the c:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM\Tools\ directory. After starting the tool, in the Authentication Strategy select “IFD+On Premise”:
Select File and then Apply Changes to save these settings.
Connect to the external website and use the uniqueName you used in the XML file during provision, something like: https://hostingmannen.hmcug.nl, for the domain security you have to install a wildcard certificate (*.hmcug.nl in my test environment).
Logon using the user account you created in HMC and that has hosted CRM configured. The only difference when logging in on the internal network is that using the IFD you have the ‘sign out’ option in the upper right corner:
This also works fine with the CRM 4.0 plug-in for Outlook 2007 (haven’t tried it with the beta of Outlook 2010 though). After installing the plug-in go to the Start Menu --> All Programs --> Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 --> Configuration Wizard to start the configuration wizard. In the Wizard select “an online service provider” to connect to.
And enter the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for the Hosted CRM solution. Please be aware that this FQDN is different for each organization that is hosted in the CRM solution.
Enter the credentials and the system requirements will be shown. When needed install the appropriate required software and click Next to continue. The plug-in will now be configured.
When finished you can start Outlook 2007 to use your hosted Exchange and your hosted CRM solution.
