Publishing Microsoft CRM 4.0 through ISA Server 2006

by Danny Varghese 02.21.09

Here is a great article that illustrates how to publish Microsoft CRM 4.0 through ISA Server 2006: http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2008/07/23/publishing-microsoft-crm-4-0-through-isa-server-2006.aspx

The article is broken up into the following sections:

1. Adjusting CRM Server For External Publishing
   1. General Considerations
   2. IFD Configuraiton

1. Configuring ISA Server 2006 Web publishing rule
2. Troubleshooting Tips

For those who need some information on Microsoft ISA Server: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISA_Server

Internet Facing Deployment (IFD) Installation Basics

Shashi Ranjan Published Friday, September 19, 2008 10:14

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Hi, I recently started owning the Internet Facing Deployment (IFD) feature set within the CRM team and so in this blog I would share some of my thoughts and insights. I have also noted that there are no IFD related blogs on CRM so far, so this should be a good start. J

IFD allows the customers to configure their CRM system to be reachable from outside the intranet (i.e. internet or outside of the firewall). The main difference when using IFD vs. typical on-premise deployment is how users are authenticated. When using the on-premise version, IIS handles most of the authentication via integrated windows authentication. There are however custom CRM authentication handler modules registered during setup to assist in the process. In IFD, the web site is opened for anonymous access and the authentication relies on the presence of the CRM ticket cookie. This cookie is obtained by starting off from a sign-in page.

Any page request that does not contain the CRM ticket cookie also gets redirected to it. This page deletes any expired CRM ticket cookies and if the user has provided correct credentials at the sign-in page, a new CRM ticket cookie would be written and used in later requests.

To install an IFD enabled CRM system, the install xml needs to have the following node in the crminstall.xml, under the path <CRMSetup><Server>. You will see that there isn’t too much information listed below, so the difference between an on-premise deployment with or without IFD should not be much. I will explain the difference later.

<ifdsettings enabled="true">

<internalnetworkaddress>157.55.160.202-255.255.255.255</internalnetworkaddress>

<rootdomainscheme>https</rootdomainscheme>

<sdkrootdomain>myDomain</sdkrootdomain>

<webapplicationrootdomain>myDomain</webapplicationrootdomain>

</ifdsettings>

Node details:

1. The <ifdsettings> node is the root node containing all the details that the CRM server needs to enable IFD.
2. The “enabled” attribute indicates if the IFD is to be enabled or not.
3. The <internalnetworkaddress> is used to separate out internal vs. external request IP address. The internal requests will continue to go though the usual on-premise authentication, whereas external requests will go though the IFD. This is also known as SPLA authentication. SPLA stands for Service Provider Licensing Agreement. The value is specified in the IPAddress-IPAddressMask format and multiple values can be specified by separating them with a semicolon.
4. The <sdkrootdomain> and the <webapplicationrootdomain> nodes are used to define the sdk and web application root domains. These should ideally be fully qualified domain names and can be same if sdk and application servers are located on the same box.

The installation of an IFD enabled CRM server is pretty simple but CRM setup does not provide any UI support for it so the IFD needs to be enabled via an xml install. Also once CRM is installed there is no easy out of box way (tools) to enable it. There is however a support tool that customers can download and use.

The support tool can be downloaded from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=69089514-6e5a-47e1-928b-4e4d4a8541c0&DisplayLang=en

The documentation to use the tool and more on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Internet Facing Deployment Scenarios can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3861e56d-b5ed-4f7f-b2fd-5a53bc71dafc&DisplayLang=en

Ok. Now lets talk about difference between an on-premise and IFD enabled on-premise deployment. On the IFD enabled deployment you would see the following.

1) A new regkey 'IfdInternalNetworkAddress' with string value in format IPAddress-IPAddressMask. This contains the value of the node <internalnetworkaddress>

2) Three new DeploymentProperties in the config database (MSCRM_CONFIG).

     a. 'IfdRootDomainScheme',

     b. 'IfdSdkRootDomain',

     c. 'IfdWebApplicationRootDomain',

select * from DeploymentProperties where ColumnName like ‘Ifd%’

Each entry has the string (NVarCharColumn) value set to the values from the config xml. The Id field in the deployment property is the deployment id.

select id from Deployment

3) Updated <crm.authentication> node in the web.config file

<authentication strategy="OnPremise " />

-->

<authentication strategy="ServiceProviderLicenseAgreement" />

4) Anonymous access being enabled on the CRM website and all web pages under it.

5) The url used to access IFD is different from on-premise. It is in the form https://myOrganizaitonName.myDomain. Jagan Peri’s blog post covers this in more detail: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/08/01/microsoft-dynamics-crm-urls.aspx

You should also checkout the latest version of SDK (version 4.0.6). It has some great examples of adding web pages in an IFD enabled CRM server and more.

The CRM SDK 4.0.6 can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82E632A7-FAF9-41E0-8EC1-A2662AAE9DFB&displaylang=en

Cheers,

Extensibility Features Live vs. On-Premise in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Microsoft Corporation
February 2008

Applies To
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live

Summary
This article provides a concise description regarding availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM extensibility features across the three types of deployments.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Extensibility Features
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 SDK documentation describes many features that enable developers to build distributed, customer relationship management (CRM) applications. This article provides a concise description regarding availability of these features across the three types of deployments:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (on-premise)


• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live (live)


• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Internet Facing Deployment (hosted)

Click here to read the full article.

How to use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Internet Facing Deployment Configuration tool

Microsoft has the CRM IFD tool located in a KB Artical. Since it is not a standard tool and the support team are the ones maintaining it, you should go to this link and

download

it whenever you need it. I was talking to the support team at Convergence and they said that whenever there is a change to the code or application they are updating the link on this KB.