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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

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!