Thursday, January 1, 2009

How to quickly switch users when demoing Dynamics CRM

This is a little trick I got shown about six months ago which is just damn handy.

In some demo scenarios you want to switch to a different user to demonstrate the differences between users. In Dynamics CRM this is commonly used to show how entity access can be limited or how different roles have different rights assigned to them.

The key to this trick is that the user that runs IE, is the user CRM authenticates to for the web client. So if you run IE as 'Bob', when you go to CRM's web address, you will log in as Bob, even if you have logged onto the domain as someone else.

To set up a shortcut for IE which you can quickly run as a different user, create an IE shortcut (right-click, save to desktop) and then right-click the shortcut and go to properties.

Clicking the Advanced button allows you to specify 'Run with different credentials'. Ticking this box means when you double-click the shortcut, you'll be prompted to enter in alternative credentials. enter them in and now when you go to the CRM URL, you will be logged in as that person.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems that "Run with different credentials" is missing at Windows 7

Leon Tribe said...

Indeed I cannot find it either in IE9/Windows 7. There is, in the IE advanced options the ability to disable integrated windows authentication so I am wondering if this could help. If not you may have to resort to the remote desktop connecting to your own computer as a different user.

crusader3r said...

As Lion said, you can use the IE option to disable the integrated windows authentication. After changing this option you have to restart IE. Then restart IE an then you will be asks you for your username and password. Under Windows 7, IE 8.0 an MS CRM 2011 it was succesfull.