Tuesday 21 August 2012

Dynamics CRM 2011 take other user share view ownership - workaround

Have you previously come across a user that wants to delete a number of views shared by another user that left the company?

The problem in CRM is that at admin level you can't take ownership of the view assigning this to yourself, because the level of permissions on the security role are only at the user-level.



I have filed an improvement request on Microsoft Dynamics CRM connect website to introduce more flexibility around this, Please vote:
https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/757204/admin-full-access-to-shared-views

To resolve the problem you could easily reset the user AD password, however in large companies you would have to file a HR form requesting permissions for this, because you will be accessing information owned by someone else in the company.

The workaround for this is quite straight forward and all done on the CRM side.
  1. Create an AD test account
  2. In CRM open the profile of the user that left the company and change the Domain Logon Name to the new test account, press tab, make sure the first and last name loads for the new account and press save, make sure you assign a security role.
  3. Over the IE icon, press SHIFT+Right-Click > Select Run as different user 
  4. Type the credentials of the test account you created on step 1, IE will run under the test account context.
  5. Open CRM and voila your test account took ownership of all the data of the user that left the company
  6. Update the views etc...
  7. Revert the changes back to the user account that left the company by again updating the Domain logon name.
Note: you obviously don't want to do this everyday, the long term solution is to wait on Microsoft to introduce new features around this. Please vote on my feature request above.


5 comments:

  1. This was very helpful! Thank you, it was a quick and easy work around.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Thomas,
    Good trick,

    What if the view is owned by Team and it is not shared with Delete or Assign rights with any other user.

    Is it still possible to delete the view, i tried with impersonation trick and its not working as its owned by Team.

    Please hint me if you have any way on this.

    Thanks in Advance,
    Abhijeet

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Abhijeet, if its owned by a Team should be fine as well, add yourself to the team, then assigned the view to yourself and delete :) Hope this helps

      Delete
  3. Thank you for posting this, exactly what I was looking for. Really odd that not even admins can take charge of a users personal view.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, got a request about this last week, and this is what I was thinking we would have to do, thanks for confirming.

    ReplyDelete