Dynamics CRM troubleshooting user access issues

As time passes, I've realised that in particular with dynamics CRM 4, often I get user account and tenant relationships messed up on the database. CRM fails to create all the user relationships between those tenants. Issues that you may find:

• User account is visible on the users list and has a security role, however user can't authenticate.
• You can't assign a security role to a specific user on a specific tenant.
• User can't connect via Outlook client, with organizationId error.
• User can't run reports (not a member of ReportingGroup).

The above situations  are typical symptoms of user and tenant relationships not created on the database. A quick way to troubleshoot and understand how the user account relates with different tenants, is illustrated on the below diagram:

As you can see above the Organization database links to the SystemUserOrganizations, so this means on the MSCRM_CONFIG you should have one entry for each tenant the user is member of. The diagram can help you to quickly identify User and Tenant relationships.

Note: for the situation where the user can't run reports, just add the user to the ReportingGroup.

Hope this was useful :)