CRM Client for Office Outlook over VPN

Recently I was working on a project where the CRM Client for Office Outlook needed to be connected to the CRM Server over the VPN. It seemed obvious that this would work seemlessly without much configuration(s) involved. Once you establish a connection or open the VPN tunnel, it's likely that CRM Client would automatically connect to the Server and load the CRM Toolbar in Outlook, which wasn't the case at my end.

I will conclude this post with the steps I took to get the CRM Client for Office Outlook running over the VPN.

1. On the Client machine. Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
2. Open the file "hosts" with notepad.
3. Add an entry with the CRM server name and the IP address in the following format
   servername (HIT TAB) IP address.
4. Save the file.

CRM Client must now connect successfully to the Server. The above steps confirms that NSLOOKUP command to the CRM Server works fine with correct resolution.