Dynamics CRM 2011 Scaling Email router with Business Units

I wrote an article a few weeks ago on how to install the email router on multiple servers. However the concept and method is a manual process and there is something new with CMR 2011 that can automate the process and easier to scale the email router.

With Dynamics CRM 2011 a new option was introduced on the security profiles that transforms the way we can use the email router. The new change I'm referring to is the queue security options, it has now the ability to read at different levels:

• Business Unit
• Parent-child Business unit
• Organizational
• User

 These options were not available with CRM 4, you could only do organizational or none. With the new options, we can easily scale our email router implementation by configuring different service accounts for each  business unit with permissions to read only at the business unit level. When installing the email router we specify which service account the email router should use. When using those specific accounts the email router returns only the users from that business unit.

The following diagrams illustrates how the concept works. First consider the following business unit layout:

We have a parent business unit with 4 child business units. Each child business unit represent the company office locations. Each city business unit will hold their own CRM users, security roles etc.

Below a more detailed diagram on how the different email routers would be placed and how many service accounts we would require in order to scale the email router:

The Service account requires Queue and User Settings Read permission at the business unit level.

The service account is configured on the email router configuration tool, deployment tab, deployment profile:

Hope this was helpful.