There are times where you may need to login to CRM 2011 as a different user for demos, testing purposes, or configuring security privileges for users. For example, say you are the system administrator for a staffing company. You will likely have employees with different roles that will require various security settings in your staffing software. To easily update and test your security settings, you can be logged in as yourself, system administrator, in one browser window and in another; you can be logged in as a staffing recruiter. This way you can immediately test the changes you make to the staffing recruiter security role.

While you could login the machine as a different user, that would be a hassle when you need to quickly go back and forth or compare side by side. An easy way to do this is to set Internet Explorer to prompt you for a user name and password every time you login into CRM.

Open Internet Options, then select the Security tab.

Click Custom level... and then scroll all the way to the bottom and select Prompt for user name and password.

Click OK twice to confirm.

The RunAs approach

Maybe you don’t want to be prompted to login every time you open your CRM staffing software in a browser. Another very easy way to handle this is to hold down the Shift key, right click on Internet Explorer and select Run as different user. However, if you only have a few specific users that you want to be able to login in as, you can create shortcuts to your CRM 2011 staffing organization on your Desktop.

Right click on your Desktop and then select New and then Shortcut.

Type in C:\Windows\System32:

runas.exe /user:domainusername "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe http://serverCRM:5555/organization"


Or...


runas.exe /user:domainusername “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe http://serverCRM/”

• Substitute domain for the name of the user’s domain that you want to use.
• Substitute username with the user’s name that you want to use.
• Substitute serverCRM with the name or IP address of the server CRM is installed on.
• Substitute organization with the name of the CRM organization you want to login to.

Click Next and then type in a name that you would like to call the shortcut such as CRM User 1.

Click Finish.

Double click your new Desktop Shortcut: a black window should pop up prompting you to enter the user’s password.

That’s it. Internet Explorer will then open up with you logged into your CRM staffing software as the user you have chosen. Again, this is a very easy and great way for a staffing company system administrator to test their various security roles in their CRM staffing software.