Internet Facing Deployment (IFD) configurations have been significantly varied from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to Microsoft CRM 2011. In the following post, these changes have been listed but before we move onto them we need to know ADFS. Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) help organization to validating users from partner organizations based on highly secure, scalable and extensive identity access solution. For example, if you are using Windows Server 2008 R2 and you want to grant permissions to external users to your some resources within your organization in a secure and simple way then you can use ADFS to ensure external users are securely authenticated and granted access. Using ADFS can also help you to establish trusteeship between untrusted resources and your organizational domain resources. In short, following are the changes that have been prominent from Dynamics CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011.
- + In Dynamics CRM 4.0 form based authentication mechanism was used for IFD whilst in CRM 2011 claim based authentication dependency is taken which makes it necessary to configure security token service like ADFS and some sort of certification management.
- + In Dynamics CRM 4.0, an administrator usually had two ways to configure IFD which are the following:
- – Setting up XML configuration file during installation
- – Using IFD configuration tool
- + In CRM 2011, IFD configuration goes through the following steps (Watch the video given below for more details):
- – Installing AD FS 2.0
- – Configuring the AD FS 2.0 federation server
- – Managing certificates
- – Configuring Dynamics CRM 2011 for claims-based authentication and IFD
- – Creating the relying party trust for CRM and configuring the claims rules on AD FS 2.0