Migrating Microsoft CRM 2011 - hosted to in-house

Question

A client has a hosted MS CRM 2011 solution, currently running on ~200 workstations within the organisation.

We are currently working through a project to inhouse this version of CRM.

We have an issue in that CRM was previously hosted at

• http://instance1.externalproviderCRM.com/
• http://instance2.externalproviderCRM.com/

and we will soon be presenting it as

• http://crm.ourdomain.co.uk/instance1
• http://crm.ourdomain.co.uk/instance2

I'm hoping (hope for the best...) that a bit of DNS hackery (CNAME) will seamlessly redirect clients from one to the other AND/OR a hosts file entry will do the same.

Its worth noting that the in house version is a standard CRM2011 install with databases imported from the hosting provider. It should be effectively identical.

What I'm worried about (...prepare for the worst) is that this won't work and we will need a method to reconfigure some 200 workstations.

• I understand that an XML file can be used during install to configure the Dynamics CRM client. Is it possible that something similar can be used to do the same on an existing install?

• Is there any other way to mass change a group of CRM clients configuration?