Robert MacLean

• User Management: Active Directory
• Email: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
• Portal/Intranet: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
• CRM: Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Database: Microsoft SQL Server
• ERP: Microsoft Dynamics GP

This shouldn’t be a shocker of a list, in fact it’s kind of the standard shopping list for any Microsoft based solution but the problem is that some of these products don't easily allow multiple organisations to use them. So lets just start with the most commonly used item on that list: Active Directory, which in my view is also the like the least able to cope with multiple organisations.

Based on what I have seen most large companies, which have a need for multiple organisations in a single deployment, seem to set up a forest and trusts and connect multiple domains together in the forest. This lets each domain be individually named and managed and provides the security for central administration and prevents each domain from doing anything to other domains. The problem with this is that it is multiple domains, which means that the administration overhead is very high, I think I would need a server at least per domain, and I really only want one because I don’t want to deploy everything multiple times. Each service should be deployed once and used many.

Well Microsoft has actually solved this with an interesting solution named Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC), which is currently in version 4.0. HMC is developed by the same division as developed one of my other favourite technologies, Customer Care Framework (CCF). HMC shares the same thought leading as CCF.  What I mean by this is they are are taking very new or different ideas and providing a solution to deliver them. The solution for HMC is delivered in the same way as CCF, in that it is a guidance package.

Next time I will jump into what is HMC and then after that we’ll get back to how HMC allows us to to take one AD domain and put multiple companies into it.