CRM 2011 IFD Setup: Part 2

My previous post refers to some resources for setting up IFD in CRM 2011. Overall the process looks scarier than it actually is. And the benefit of having IFD is that you can access CRM without having to jump through any firewalls etc. in about the same way as you can access your webmail from any location (or maybe not in your case...?). Not to mention the fact that some third party solutions may require that you have IFD set up as a prerequisite for configuring the solution.

Anyway when you walk through the videos, you will have ended up creating at least 4 URLS (which you'll need to configure in your DNS):

• adfs.yourdomain.com (or sts1.yourdomain.com as shown in one of the videos) - External facing. URL used for authenticating to ADFS.
• auth.yourdomain.com - External facing. Your IFD federation endpoint.
• dev.yourdomain.com - External facing. Discovery web service.
• org1.yourdomain.com - External facing. Your IFD access URL for your CRM organization (org1 = whatever your CRM organization name is)

I say "at least 4" because you may end up with more. This would be the case if:

• You create an internal alias for your CRM deployment e.g. crm.yourdomain.com (you may do this even if you're not configuring IFD but as it's mentioned in the video I thought I'd mention it here too)
• Access to additional organizations in your CRM deployment. Relevant if you're a hosting partner or for whatever reason you decide to have multiple orgs in your company's deployment (this will be the subject of a future post). For example:
• org2.yourdomain.com
• org3.yourdomain.com
• ...
• orgn.yourdomain.com