CRM Email Router and Forms Authentication

One of the single-most annoying issues when trying to get the CRM email router up and running is when you are trying to get the incoming connector to work and the OWA site in Exchange is set up to use Forms Authentication (which is nice for end users and doesn't work at all with the email router). The easiest solution I have found for Exchange 2007 is to simply create a second OWA site using Integrated Authentication and just use that for the email router, leaving the standard OWA site for end users and Forms Auth.

To this end, I will refer to a blog post here: http://blog.networkfoo.org/?p=195

This post has a list of handy PowerShell commands you can run to create the new site and all the information you need to configure it with the email router. This site has helped me a number of times, and I'm posting it here mostly as a bookmark for myself so I don't lose it again!

In case this post ever goes away, the meat of the article is the following 4 commands (create a new IIS website FIRST):

• New-OwaVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2007 -Name “owa” -WebSiteName “OWA-CRMRouter”
• New-OwaVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2003or2000 -Name “Exchange” -WebSiteName “OWA-CRMRouter” -VirtualDirectoryType:Mailboxes
• New-OwaVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2003or2000 -Name “Exadmin” -WebSiteName “OWA-CRMRouter” -VirtualDirectoryType:Exadmin
• New-OwaVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2003or2000 -Name “Exchweb” -WebSiteName “OWA-CRMRouter” -VirtualDirectoryType:Exchweb

There is also more information on this page:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124811.aspx