Configuring Internet Facing Deployment for Microsoft CRM 4.0

After running the tool to configure the CRM website for an Internet Facing Deployment (see the articles here and here) we got the old familiar Runtime Error: Server error in / Application. We turned on remote errors and saw the underlying error message was even less helpful: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

After some digging, it turns out there was a registry key on the CRM server that incorrectly identified the identifier of the CRM website in IIS.

The 'website' registry key at \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM had a value of '/LM/W3SVC/1' and it should have been '/LM/W3SVC/5'

You can see the identifier for the CRM website in this screen capture from IIS:




All we had to do is navigate to the registry key and change the value to reflect the identifier that we saw in IIS.