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One of our clients has on premise Microsoft CRM 4.0 Workgroup edition and Exchange, and I'm looking into the possibility of moving CRM off site to a specialist company as a hosted (SaaS) solution.

For what I've learned about CRM, it is quite tightly integrated into Exchange and AD.

If I do move CRM to a company that provide MS CRM hosting, does the system still have dependencies on our AD, and if so, how does this work?

Arun Vinoth - MVP
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Bryan
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1 Answers1

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Hosted CRM is almost always accessed by a Live ID, the same goes for host Exchange. You get a "special" Live client that has to be running on the workstation you're accessing it from, that client authenticates and integrates Outlook with the hosted service.

In short, you have host AD and Exchange locally, and CRM in the cloud, it just takes an extra little client to make it work.

Chris S
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    this will be completely flipped on its head soon http://blogs.msdn.com/b/plankytronixx/archive/2010/11/27/single-sign-on-between-on-premise-apps-windows-azure-apps-and-office-365-services.aspx – tony roth Dec 02 '10 at 15:55
  • also note this does include their CRM functionality – tony roth Dec 02 '10 at 15:56
  • @Tony, it's great the MS will finally use the services that have been available for years now to integrated hosted service authentication; but Office 365 hasn't been released yet, no date has been announced, and MS announced when the individually hosted pieces will be able to use the authentication integration. I wouldn't hold my breath on all this stuff coming "soon". – Chris S Dec 02 '10 at 18:32