Saturday 17 December 2011

Configuring IFD for MS Dynamics CRM 2011

I've started going through the various training manuals for the MS Dynamics CRM Certification exams and one of the things that I had never done before was to configure an Internet Facing Deployment, so I grabbed Microsoft's white paper and went to work. I am not going to provide a step by step of what I've done, if that's what you are after have a look at this post on the InteractiveWebs blog, I just wanted to comment on the issues that I encountered.

In the white paper it wasn't too clear, I did skim through it rather than read it in detail, that it was geared towards a single server (CRM + ADFS 2.0) setup, so that it had, for me, some unnecessary steps, or quite a lot as for some reason I started using port 444 halfway through, which needless to say did not make life any easier.

I've still not had time to go through everything in detail, I just got it working, but I cannot really understand the terminology, when you configure IFD you have to provide the following:
  • Web Application Server Domain
  • Organization Web Server Domain
  • Discovery Web Service Domain
but these simply point to you CRM Server yet you still need these (I imagine, I've not tried odd values here), which means that you also need to add DNS entries, preferably CNames to make life easier, for it to work.
 
You also need an orgname.mydomain.com DNS entry to actually access you IFD externally, which technically means that you need to buy that domain so that it can be accessed externally, unless you are configuring IFD for the sake of it, like I am.

1 comment:

  1. The whole purpose of IFD is it enables you to have the same CRM content available inside your company's intranet with one URL, and also available to partners or clients on your extranet with a different URL.

    Unless you configure IFD, this would not be possible with Dynamics CRM.

    -PlateSpinner

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