Access a Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server Through Multiple Domains

Accessing a Microsoft Dynamics NAV server through multiple different domains tends to be very frustrating! Have you ever encountered a situation where you needed to connect a NAV role-tailored client (RTC) from one domain to a NAV server on another domain? Well, I did. And I must say that this can be a big problem for international companies who have strong security policies.

Luckily, Microsoft has peculiarities in its server and infrastructure products that are actually quite useful for approaching this requirement. The process I describe below may not be particularly efficient for an IT person to manage, but it is a working approach for a situation that is 100% possible to encounter in the real world.

When thinking about how to solve this problem, the main challenge that came to my attention was how to transfer permissions from one domain to another with same users, and how those users would authenticate to the NAV server with Windows authentication. I must say that I was really surprised when I found out that Windows recognizes a user between domains as the same user if they have same user name and password.

To start, let's assume that you have created users on the NAV server which is in a different organizational unit and different domain from the user who wants to use the RTC.

Active Directory Setup

Create users on the servers in Active Directory with appropriate rights and in the appropriate organizational unit. Remember that when when creating new users, they must have the same user name and password as users set up on the NAV server.

When you've created a user, just click Finish to apply newly created user.

To check if your user ...