So in the first five parts we have looked at the standard stuff, now lets dive into a real product and we'll tackle the one I am most familiar with: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Thankfully MSCRM 4.0 is the first version of the product to really support a hosted model. Somehow MSCRM 3.0 could do hosted, but based on the architecture you would have ended up hacking a lot in it to get it to work. I never did hosted MSCRM myself in version 3.0 so that thinking is just based my understanding of the architecture of MSCRM 3.0.

So how is MSCRM 4.0 different from 3.0 and how does that allow it to be easily hosted? Well firstly you can now have a single deployment with multiple databases, one for each organisation. This means that each organisations data, settings and customizations are completely separate! This is great if every machine is on the domain but in hosting you need a way to provide a way to login over the web or via a special client. This is because in a hosted model, despite the fact you have a domain, your end users may be on a separate domain. Thankfully MSCRM 4.0 provides BOTH! This is configured using the IFD tool which actually enables MSCRM to look at what the source IP address is, and if it is a local network IP uses standard NTLM authentication. However if it sees it as external IP address it presents a form based authentication which the user can use to login with, this means that not only does the web interface work over the Internet but it also means the outlook client works too.

If you are a regular MSCRM user you likely love the dynamic export to Excel, and for those who don't know what it is let me explain briefly. In MSCRM you can export almost any data to Excel and it can be updated dynamically live from within MSCRM. This works by creating a data set in the Excel spreadsheet and putting the SQL for your query in the data set. The problem with this scenario is that Excel uses direct connections to SQL to do this, so does this mean you need to expose your SQL server? Not at all, if you are running the Outlook client a button is added to Excel which actually reverses the SQL and uses the normal MSCRM web services to get the data! So you can still just expose MSCRM to the net, keeping security high, and lowering administrative overhead. Note: This is only available if you are using IFD deployments.

If you are planning to do hosted MSCRM you may find the hosted deployment guide interesting, as it explains how to setup MSCRM 4.0, however it is not the most logical guide as it is broken into three sections. The first section is how to configure your environment for hosted MSCRM. This is actually the exact same information as included in the HMC guide for configuration of the environment, which brings us to the second section how to use HMC with MSCRM. So not only do they repeat what is in the HMC guide, they then tell you to do go through that guide. It's pointless and a massive waste of space. The only advantage is that if you had never heard of HMC this might point you in the right direction. The last section in contrast has some interesting and useful information on the additional steps for MSCRM to get it to run in an IFD mode like how to edit the install configuration file to setup IFD from the install (but the easier and less error prone route is to use the IFD tool) and any extra configuration needed for hosted (such as changing the security of the web site in IIS to anonymous).

Something that is vital for a happy hosting environment for MSCRM is that you must make sure the async service is running all the time. This is vital not only because it manages the workflow (and what good is MSCRM without workflow), imports and background processes but in a hosted scenario it also handles logins which are done via the forms based authentication.

Really MSCRM is pretty easy to get hosted and setup and while the demo HMC web console doesn't provide automatic provisioning tools, a lot of the third party ones do have options for MSCRM. Something I have learnt is that when you deploy MSCRM 4.0, even if it is not a hosted deployment it is worthwhile to make every MSCRM deployment an IFD. My reasoning for this is two fold:

1. Authentication is handled in a superior way, as you have normal NTLM and forms based. This can give you a way to solve those complex Kerberos based issues caused by problems in AD without needing to mess around with AD.
2. If not now, at some point in the near future, someone in your business will want to work from home or while on a business trip. You can save them having to mess around with VPNs and just point them to the same URL as they normally use (provided you have setup your DNS and firewall right), so you will save some headaches for you and your users.

If this has interested you, make sure you go to TechEd Africa as there is a IFD Tips and Tricks session for Microsoft CRM!

Guess a couple of weeks is really only one week and some change in Microspeak (for SA it’s only one week thanks to public holidays). Read more on it the MSDN blogs.

A little note from the editor (he he, like I have an editor). The previous post was late due to circumstances I can't even explain, sorry about that (to make it up, I have post this a few hours earlier). Also if you have been reading on the site the formatting has been slightly out due to security permissions, which I will remember to fix up in future. Anyway hope you enjoy the posts, and now back to the regular scheduled (he he) broadcast.

So part 4 was a really massive post because there is so much that HMC does for AD, but this post is a lot short because HMC provides similar functionality for Exchange as AD. The primary similarity is that it uses properties in AD to completely separate companies so that even on a GAL level you cannot see other companies email addresses (see the end of part 4 about the security issues).

Exchange management is also an area where I learnt not to trust the management web interface is showing me everything HMC could do, cause in reality it is just a subset. For instance if you want to create a distribution group, there is no option in the interface or even in the samples. However if you dig through the SDK you will find the details of how it can be done and the SDK has a sample in the documentation which you can copy, paste and edit and use that.

The biggest headache with the Exchange deployment for me was not HMC, which was really easy in comparison, but the setting up of the auto discover system and the certificates for that. At the end of the day there was three critical things I used to get it solved:

1. Making sure the DNS was correctly setup. I'll cover DNS issues in part 11 (yeah I’ve written that far in advance).
2. Using http://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com which is a prototype web site from the Microsoft Exchange team which allows you to run tests of common Exchange systems over the Internet.
3. Lastly setting up the auto discover redirect, which is not normally needed but in a hosted environment is essential. The reason it is so essential is that unless you are going to automate your DNS provisioning (which you should anyway and HMC doesn't do out the box) and automate your purchasing of SAN (server alternative name) certificates which are extremely expensive and I wouldn't know where to start with that (BizTalk maybe) you are going to have to setup a single certificate and direct all customers through one interface. The easiest way to do it is from an article I found on the Exchange team blog: More on Exchange 2007 and certificates - with real world scenario (search for The Other Method).

One of the great things about the OU structure is that allows you to have a top level organisation (which is called the hosting company), a second level organisation/s (the resellers) and a third level organisation/s (the customers). The second level is very exciting as this is actually the level at which sales are done and due to the structure the multiple resellers can exist and can work with their customer base but are secured away from other customers and resellers. If you thinking of white boxing a hosting solution, this is how it is done.

Security is obviously taken into account by the HMC engine will let a administrator on a hosting company level manage anyone within the system, on the reseller level you can work add accounts to your own account and any of your customer via the web interface. But does this mean you will spend your admin days in the web interface? Definitely not! Your AD skills still apply and you can still manage users, computers, set group policies and reset passwords etc... But you should be doing provisioning (creation of items) through the web interface or the engine as it will save you from having to edit AD properties manually later on for instance. If you aren't looking at white boxing it then you would just have your hosting company and one reseller and then various organisations as customers.

You may have picked up that I said you can use the engine to provision and you may have thought that meant you need to use the SDK and write code, well you don't have to! Microsoft have actually included a tool called Provtest which is a command line tool on your HMC server which you pass an XML file to. It takes the file and parses it and pushes it to the engine and displays the result. This is actually the same way the SDK works, in that you pass XML to the web services or COM+ object to do things. Microsoft also includes many samples with HMC, and even more in the SDK. So what you may find yourself doing it a lot of that, especially when you get to Exchange management.

One of the ways HMC also modifies the AD object properties is that the login name gets set in such a way that it allows each customer to have their own domain name (sort of) however it's just on the AD account name. This isn't an easy concept to grasp without an example, so lets say the hosting company domain is Contoso.local, and lets say that a customer named Northwind signs up with one of their resellers (who the reseller is, is not important). The Northwind guys decide they want their domain to be Northwind.com, so via the web interface they add Fred and set his login to be [email protected]. What HMC does is set the AD account name to [email protected], however in the background it sets the SAM account name (or the pre-Windows 2000 name) to be contoso.local\fred_northwind.. Yes, it should be dot-dot, the first dot for the SAM account and second for the grammar. So all customers are on the same domain at the core but the account name is what they would use to login to OWA, their machine or an application like MSCRM.

The SAM account name is vitally important still as most applications don't like using account name internally. For example MSCRM allows you to login with the account name, but when adding users individually you cannot use the account name, you must use the SAM account name. Odd though the multiple user add option does work with the account name. This is a annoying problem as it means you need to expose the (ugly) SAM name to your customers and if you have named you hosting level with something distinctive it could limit your white box ability!

This disconnect between account name and SAM account is a massive pain in ass for service accounts too, as I lost way too much time during the deployment on many services just retyping passwords and resetting them because I thought I was losing my mind. Only to realise that the application didn't like something in the username and wanted the SAM account name. The worst experience I had with passwords during all of this was with Forefront, where it not only didn't like the account name but also didn't like the fact the domain name (on the hosting company level) had a dot in it.

The security isn’t perfect though as there are times when you can see all users in the system. In an earlier version of HMC, there was a problem with the address books where everyone could see everyone but that has been corrected. For MSCRM though the add multiple user interface shows all users when you hit the lookup if you have not configured MSCRM correctly. I’ll come back to this point later in the series when I take about MOSS.

Next is web based management console for the system, however the web based management console is a prototype and comes with no official support from Microsoft. The advantage of the web based management console is all the source code is provided so you can either use it as a base for building your own or for samples to build integration into your existing management system. As a side note there are a number of third party management consoles out there, which I would highly recommend looking into if you are reading this for building your own system.

The last part of the package is documents, documents and more documents. The SDK provided goes over all the systems in the engine and how to expand it and is really useful (I’ll cover why in part 5). However more useful than that is the deployment guide which takes you step by step in how to deploy the solution for an sample company. The only piece of documentation I would add to those is the unofficial consolidated deployment guide which is additive to the actual guide but provides details on how to do HMC without the 20+ needed servers you normally need and only use 8!

To deploy HMC you really just step through the guide however it will take a number of days and a lot of diverse skills to get it right (expect to need a .Net developer, an AD expert, an Exchange expert and someone with clustering experience would be bare minimum skills) and you should have a working system which is the same as all others.

Expect severe punishment though for not following the guide word for word. For example we initially tried to have a pure Windows 2008 Server x64 environment despite what the guide said and we were punished. Unfortunately all that work had to be scrapped as HMC did not not work. In the end the call to change the servers to match what the guide said, enabled a semi-normal sleep life again.

Another example of not following the guide to the is that HMC is built on .Net 2.0 RTM, however a fix included in 2.0 SP1 actually breaks HMC. That means you cannot install .Net 3.0 or 3.5 on any key HMC server as they will install the service pack for you and bork HMC :( Patches do exist for this bug but it may be worthwhile to wait for the upcoming 4.5 release of HMC if you are thinking about deploying this anytime soon.

Finally an update on when HMC 4.5 is supposed to be released (last bit of information, which came out in March, said end May) and it is… A few more weeks :(

*sigh* still latest news on the 4.0 to 4.5 upgrade is +60 days after release…

I had a great chance to write some kick ass Silverlight code last week as a proof of concept for a potential new business venture the company I work at is thinking about, and hopefully in 6 months to a year I will be able to talk about it. The final solution won’t be Silverlight based but for the POC it provided the delivery method, functionality and UI that gets the message across.

Part of that POC was to be able to have a local XML file (local as on the server) loaded when the application was open and parsed. So the only way to do that is to use the WebClient class and call the DownloadStringAsync method with the URI to the XML file and then parse that in an XDocument. Not rocket science at all, but when I tried it I kept getting a message “An exception of type ‘System.NotSupportedException’ occurred in System.Windows.dll but was not handled in user code Additional Information: Specified method not supported.”

No matter what I tried I could not get it to work :( Eventually I figured out that it only was occurring when debugging/running from within Visual Studio. Publishing it to an actual web server and running it as a user would worked perfectly. This is a big issue for me, since it makes ad-hoc testing and debugging very difficult. Thankfully for me it was just a POC, but this could be a big pain for serious projects.

Well there is a solution for that now besides going to the web site and downloading them, it’s called Live! Yip, Microsoft’s hosted solutions, have the solution in two forms. Firstly there is a file listing page http://live.sysinternals.com which just lists all the files so in one click you can get the tool you need, but even better, it’s also published as a file share! So if you open \\Live.sysinternals.com\tools you can actually browse a file share for the tool you need.

• 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.