Setting up your development environment for a CRM 2011 project

Following a series of recent articles I have posted about solutions, I wanted to share some information about how you can set up an efficient development environment for your CRM 2011 project. Managing the solution synchronization among multiple environments (dev, test, prod, et.) is not always straight forward and it depends on multiple factors such as the scope of your project and the size of your team. In general, I have found an environment topology that facilitates an efficient development team and applies to most CRM projects:

Note that in the table above, each of the “environments” are not necessarily separate servers. If you have a multi-tenant CRM server you could host one or more of these environments in the same box. the only caveat is that you need to make sure that an activity happening in one environment will not interfere with an activity in another environment. For example, all environments in which the developers need to debug on the server side should be separate box since you don’t want to block testers and Business Analysts due to the debugging session in one of the CRM organizations. Thus, as a minimum, the “Individual Development Boxes” should be separate CRM servers.

Remember this is not applicable 100% all of the time exactly as shown, but it is a good start to define your development environment strategy.

How to access CRM from different user accounts at the same time

Many times when you are testing CRM you need to access the web application from multiple test users. It is a bit annoying to have to log out of Windows and log in with another user to test something in the CRM application. Here is a trick on how you can access CRM (OnPremise, IFD, Online) from different users at the same time (in different IE windows):

While pressing down the “Shift” key, right-click on the Internet Explorer icon and select “Run as a different user”:

 

For OnPremise CRM: Enter the credentials of the user which you want to test CRM with. When you go to the CRM site, you should be automatically logged in as the user that you selected to run Internet Explorer as. You can open as many IE sessions with as many different users as you want!

For IFD / CRM Online: For each CRM user that you want to test you need to enter the credentials for any existing user (domain or local user). Then you can navigate to the CRM login site and enter the CRM credentials for the user you want to test. You can also open as many sessions with different users as you want.

For CRM for Outlook: Unfortunately you cannot execute multiple simultaneous Outlook windows using different users (at least not that I know about).

 

I have found this trick quite helpful and now I find myself logged in to CRM with multiple users at the same time so I can test things like security roles, email, etc.