Setting up your development environment for a CRM 2011 project

Following a series of recent articles I have posted about solutions, I wanted to share some information about how you can set up an efficient development environment for your CRM 2011 project. Managing the solution synchronization among multiple environments (dev, test, prod, et.) is not always straight forward and it depends on multiple factors such as the scope of your project and the size of your team. In general, I have found an environment topology that facilitates an efficient development team and applies to most CRM projects:

Note that in the table above, each of the “environments” are not necessarily separate servers. If you have a multi-tenant CRM server you could host one or more of these environments in the same box. the only caveat is that you need to make sure that an activity happening in one environment will not interfere with an activity in another environment. For example, all environments in which the developers need to debug on the server side should be separate box since you don’t want to block testers and Business Analysts due to the debugging session in one of the CRM organizations. Thus, as a minimum, the “Individual Development Boxes” should be separate CRM servers.

Remember this is not applicable 100% all of the time exactly as shown, but it is a good start to define your development environment strategy.