MS CRM 2011: User Off-Boarding

It happens a lot in this life, that one day, one person has to leave a company.  Let's have a look at some off-boarding situations:

Left for good with no replacement

In MS CRM you cannot delete a user, but you can successfully deactivate him or her. Deactivation will  free one license and disable CRM access for this user. All  historical record ownership will stay intact.

To deactivate a user:

1. Click Settings -> Administration in the Navigation Pane.

2. Click Users.

3. Open the user record for the former employee.

4. Click Disable.
5. Click OK.

Note:

• Make sure to reassign the workflows from a former user to another user before deactivation.
• If you have created a test user in a test system and want to delete it, you will have to delete your test CRM organization and start all over again.
• If you are using MST Office 365 to manage your subscription, just remove a user on the Office 365 portal Users page.
• You can disable Users that belong to the same Business Unit all at ones, by disabling this Business Unit.

• Removing a User Role from a user will disable the access to the system. However, this will still keep the account active. In this case all records owned by this user will still by owned by him or her. This situation may lead to other users experiencing security error messages when working with these ghost owned records.

Nothing is irreplaceable

One person is leaving and another is ready to take over the duties. In this case, we will first  need to do reassign previous owner's records to a new person. MS CRM makes it possible by using the bulk record reassignment or manual record reassignment features.

To  do bulk record reassignment:

1. Click Settings -> Administration in the Navigation Pane.

2. Click Users.

3. Open the user record for the former employee.

4. Click Reassign Records.

5. Choose Assign to me or Assign to another user or team.

6. Click Ok.

To do manual record reassignment:

1. Go the entity's records or run Advanced Find with specific criteria.

2. Select all records to be reassigned.

3. Click Assign on the Ribbon.
4. Select a User to assign these records to.

5. Click Ok.

Note:

• Bulk record reassignment should be used with care since it reassigns records' ownership of all completed activities, qualified leads, resolved cases and so on. This action will affect historical reporting.

• To make ownership  changes flow from Account to related cases, orders and so on, consider changing entity Relationship Behavior to Cascade All.

• Reassignment will not change appointments, where this user is an attendee.

Moved to a different location but under the same company

When one person stays in the company but moves to another department (business unit), you can easily reassign this user to a new unit.

To reassign a user to a different Business Unit:

1. Click Settings -> Administration in the Navigation Pane.

2. Click Users.

3. Open the user record for the former employee.

4. Click Change Business Unit.

5. Select a new Business Unit.

6. Click OK.

Note:

• Security roles will have to be assigned again to a user in a new Business Unit.
• If there is a large amount of records owned by users to be reassigned, the Business Unit change process might error out due to a timeout issue. In this case, you can increase server timeout or reduce the database size