Dynamics CRM Connectivity and Firewall Requirements

The Dynamics CRM team released a new white paper providing guidance for the connectivity requirements for typical Dynamics CRM on premise installations. It covers both regular on premise and IFD scenarios.

I don't think there's any earth shattering revelations made in this white paper and given that it is choc-full of riveting port settings requirements it is a real page turner (thankfully relatively short at 12 pages). All kidding aside this document is a good reference to file somewhere in your brain that you can pull out especially for those cases where the IT department has very rigid controls over their internal IT infrastructure.

I thought the following diagram (page 6) to be especially helpful as a visual guide although I'm not sure the dotted line between the client machine and the SQL Server is entirely accurate. I would think that it's necessary for all reporting requirements and not just for the Excel export function. That's unless you're not planning on having any custom reports or that all report development will be performed via RDP on the SQL server. Either way, I think it is unlikely in most installations for this to be a "dotted" line.

Other than that I also think the table on the following page provides a good summary that helps explain the overall picture to system administrators unfamiliar with the Dynamics CRM deployment footprint.

The white paper can be downloaded from here.