a blog about nothing

Consider the following environment:

3 x Win2008R2 SP1 RDS (terminal servers with load balancing)
1 x Win2008R2 SP1 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (Rollup pack 2 at the moment)
CRM for Outlook installed on the RDS servers.

Since you don’t want users to save documents, pictures, etc. on the RDS servers, and you want the users environment to be the same no matter what RDS server they happen to be routed to, you configure Folder Redirection and Roaming Profiles.

Doing this will leave your MS CRM installation in an unsupported state as MS CRM 4 and CRM 2011 don’t support Folder Redirection.

Problems I experienced:

If you open up a window from CRM and then you close it, you’ll get: “An error occurred. Send Report to Microsoft?”

If you open CRM for Outlook as a normal user, and you try to track an email, you’ll get and error stating that it didn’t work. If you look in the Event log on the RDS server you’ll see:

EventID 5972 Source MSCRMAddin

I opened a support case with Microsoft, and got in contact with the MS CRM team. They told me that Folder Redirection (FR) is unsupported in MS CRM, so I had to remove FR if they should be able to investigate any further.

That would be a huge drawback, since we uses load balancing between the RDS’s, and the users would be saving documents directly on the RDS servers. Ouch!

Solution: Remove Folder Redirection completly

Solution (unsupported):

There are two files (caches) that have to be local on the RDS for CRM to work. “EmailCache.sdf” and “OutlookSyncCache.sdf”.

They are located in the “%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MSCRM” folder. If you redirect “Appdata(Roaming)” those two files will be on a file share. That will cause problems for the CRM client and present you some weird errors.

So if you have to use FR, you can’t redirect “AppData”. That folder has to be local. The rest of the folders didn’t seem to cause any problems redirecting.

There are no official KB’s stating that Folder Redirection is unsupported in CRM 4 and CRM 2011, but it is. The CRM support team told me the product team was working on it, and there might come a resolution in the upcoming versions / rollups.

COYS!

Without Folder Redirection, users might/will save data on their local profile on their computer. If they accidentally delete such a file, you don’t have a backup of it (unless you take backups of workstations which I doubt…).

Configuring Folder Redirection is fairly easy, but you should get it configured correctly.

In this step-by-step I will just use a domain controller (DC) to store the user folders. I always strive to keep DCs dedicated and don’t mix other roles to them. If you don’t have the HW or budget I guess you don’t have a choice.

Open up the “Share and Storage Manager” (that came along with Win2008, which in fact is a great tool).

In the Action frame, choose “Provision Share”:

Click “Browse” and “Make new folder”. Give it a meaningful name like “FolderRedir” or similar:

  Edit the NTFS permissions:

Remove the inheritance so it don’t get permissions from its parent folder:

Permissions:

Administrators: Full Control, “This folder, subfolders and files”
System: Full Control, “This folder, subfolders and files”
Users (or a group containing the domain users): READ & Execute + “Create folders / Append data”, “This folder only”
Creator Owner: Full Control, “Subfolders and files only“

Give it a share name and make it administrative (add a $ at the end of the share name):

Enable “Access-based enumeration” (optional). This feature will only list folders the user has access to when browsing:

Set the share permissions:

Domain admins: Full Control
Users (or a group containing the domain users): Full Control

If you use DFS, you should consider placing the folder redirection on the DFS for redundancy. If you don’t have it, just click Next:

Hit Next and Create the good stuff.

With the share and NTFS permissions in place, you have to create a Group Policy Object (GPO):

Open the Group Policy Management Consol:

Create a new GPO, and give it an informative name. I.e. “GPO_FolderRedir”.

Navigate to “User Configuration – Windows Settings – Folder Redirection”. You now have to decide what you want to redirect. You can redirect all, or just a few. “Documents”, “Desktop”  and “Favorites” are handsome to pick if you don’t pick all.

If all your users should be on the same share, you should use the “Basic” setting. If you have different shares for different domain groups you can use the “Advanced” setting.

Set “Root Path” = the share path you created earlier.

On the Settings tab, untick the “Grant the users exclusive rights to Documents” if you want domain admins to have access to the redirected folders. If you don’t untick it now and the folders are created, unticking it at a later time will not give domain admins access to the already created folders. You have to take ownership on the folder to gain access. If a user logs on the redirection will not work as the user has to be the owner.

Now you can link the GPO to an OU (not a Container like “Users”) where the users resides.
When the users logs on, the folders are created automatically and the permissions are set correctly. If the user saves i.e. a Word document to My Documents, it’s saved on the file server.

If you have terminal server users, folder redirection in conjunction with Roaming Profiles is a m.u.s.t!

COYS! 
(even though Manchester City bought a Champions League place)