Congrats you almost have your own AD

A curious thing happened as we wanted to leverage more of the Microsoft stack in the development process. We determined that we could use Exchange rules, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM as platforms for application development. Just as we were discovering this our infrastructure group for all the right reasons didn’t want us developing on top of our production Exchange, AD and SharePoint boxes.

We made a courageous decision to isolate our development environment from the rest of our environments and empowering the development group with configuration, administration and troubleshooting responsibilities for their new environments. We wound up with our own child domain, a DNS server and a whole bunch of issues.

For those of you trying to isolate your own development environment, I strongly suggest negotiating with your infrastructure team exactly what your requirements are. We deferred many of the decisions off to them as it is their area of expertise. What we wound up with is troubleshooting the infrastructure (with their assistance) while trying to install our first application. Now in all fairness our first application is Dynamics CRM and it can be a beast, but I’ve installed this thing on single and multiple box installs a few times now and I’ve never been this frustrated.

For those developers out there who would like their own little slice of Heaven, I strongly suggest working side by side with your infrastructure team and be specific about the type of environment you require. If necessary get an outside mediator to assist you. Perhaps you will not spend a week of your iteration debugging DNS and Kerberos issues and avoid the temptation to point fingers.