Deployment Considerations

Now that we've discussed all the cool features that CRMSO provides, let's put some thought into what you'll need to consider when deploying it. The first thing you should know is that CRMSO is not a great fit in Citrix/Remote Desktop environments. In this type of hosted environment, you are basically using your client computer as a dummy terminal running all your applications on a server somewhere with multiple user profiles. Version 1.0 of CRMSO does not work in this situation because you cannot have it installed under multiple user profiles on the same computer. You can have multiple profiles on your CRMSO computer, but only one can be running CRMSO. In a typical “traveling sales guy with laptop environment,” this is a non-issue.

If you think about it, it doesn't make sense to have an offline database in a Citrix environment anyway. All you would be doing is replicating data onto a server to which you will not have remote.

There is one other consideration when deploying in a hosted environment. That is that the SQL Server, Exchange Server, and CRM Server must be on the same native Active Directory domain. In many hosted environments, several clients all share common Microsoft Exchange and SQL Servers, so putting those on the domain of any one client is not feasible. In many non-hosted environments, it might be simpler to initially create a new native Active Directory domain rather than to immediately upgrade all servers to native Active Directory.