Launcher Support for External Login via Firewalls

Learn about CRM.launcher for external third party users.

Organizations not only allow users to connect to CRM.Web from within their intranets but also allow external users to connect over the internet via non-transparent firewalls. To authenticate the external users they use their proxy or domain servers as well as external third-party providers.

Third-party providers allow organizations to customize and use their web interface to authenticate external users. CRM.Launcher supports authenticating external users by displaying their customized login forms in a pop-up window.

A sample screenshot is shown below:

To enable CRM.Launcher to authenticate users as described above, set the ShowWebLoginPopup property in the Launcher's application configuration file:

<configuration>
    <update.net>
        <update.launcher>
            <ShowWebLoginPopup>true</ShowWebLoginPopup>
        </update.launcher>
    </update.net>
</configuration>

As CRM.Launcher needs to communicate with the server several times and to prevent showing this popup every time a request to the server is served, it can re-use the cookies received in the first response after a successful login. To save these cookies for all future logins, set the SaveAuthenticationCookies property in the Launcher's application configuration file:

<configuration>
    <update.net>
        <update.launcher>
            <SaveAuthenticationCookies>true</SaveAuthenticationCookies>
        </update.launcher>
    </update.net>
</configuration>