To access Dynamics CRM 4 (on premise) from the Internet, you’d to configure IFD and you could use i.e. ISA in a DMZ if you didn’t want the CRM server to be facing the Internet.

If you decided to use ISA you couldn’t use the built-in security provided by ISA/UAG, but you had to just tunnel all traffic through and let the CRM server authenticate the user. This was not so cool, but it was fairly easy to set up and configure.

With the release of Dynamics CRM 2011 things started to get a little more complicated. If you wanted to access CRM from the Internet you’d to configure claims-based authentication, ADFS 2.0 and IFD. UAG was not supported.

I was taken by surprise when I read about this, since Microsoft uses UAG to make i.e. Exchange and SharePoint more secure. Did they forget about CRM?

Products like Citrix Access Gateway began to take a sole lead.

Things changed with the release of UAG Service Pack 1. CRM is now supported to be published via UAG. You don’t need to set up ADFS and claims. Let the UAG do the job to secure and authenticate the users. With or without two-factor authentication like RSA.

Easy to configure, easy to understand 🙂

Reference:

Publishing: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh490315.aspx
UAG: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/forefront/unified-access-gateway.aspx