In today’s article I will cover an error that appeared when trying to configure the SmartConnect CRM connector to a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online server and the steps we took to determine the cause.

In the example below, we received the error message “Failed to connect to the CRM Server: Failed to get CRM 2011 Organizations: Access is denied” when attempting to connect to a Microsoft Online Federation Authentication type.

The first thing we checked was if the CRM user account appearing on the SmartConnect CRM connector could actually log in to CRM from the server running SmartConnect. Once logged in to CRM with the user account, you will want to make sure the user is a System Administrator in CRM.

 

After we confirmed the CRM user could access CRM and we had the appropriate permissions within CRM, we needed to verify the URL for the Dynamics CRM to Azure Service was correctly entered.

While still logged in to CRM as the Admin user and we check the Developer Resources by going to Settings>Customizations>Developer Resources. Here is where we saw the Dynamics CRM URL that we needed to enter in the SmartConnect CRM connector CRM server.

In this particular example, the client happened to be located in Canada and was using a different CRM URL than the standard “crm.dynamics.com” URL. This is likely configured based off the CRM DataCenter Management and Load Balancing servers that Microsoft uses for organizations around the world.

Once we entered the correct CRM URL, we were able to Refresh the SmartConnect CRM Connector and the Organization appeared in the drop down list and our error message no longer appeared.