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Playing with IFD

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Well, it’s been a while since I wrote my last post... I've been laser focused on CRM5 planning.... yes.. CRM5 :). Nope, I cannot share any details yet but I'm sure info will start to permeate little by little.

 Anyway, I took a little break from designing and decided to play with IFD (Internet Facing Deployment) given that just a few days ago the so long expected IFD tool was released (more info here). Basically, the tool lets you configure a bunch of settings that allow CRM to use forms authentication instead of integrated windows authentication… the benefits? No VPN needed for the outlook client and deployments that can be accessed directly through the internet. If you want the full story I recommend you reading the implementation guide as well as the guide for hosters.

So, I downloaded the tool, tried to enable my CRM to work with IFD (my objective was to enable IFD to work for any address)…and it didn’t work; windows auth was still taking place (CRM can work with windows auth and form auth at the same time). It took me several minutes to remember how the internal network address stuff worked. I finally remembered that I basically had to put an address/mask that would make any request being seen as an external request… in other words a subnet mask that defined a subnet different from the subnet of the clients (the key is the subnet you see).

Anyway, the above plus some hacks to my host file (I didn’t want to get into the trouble of adding true DNS entries) allowed me to access my CRM server using IFD… pretty cool.

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