D365 Quick Tip – Why should you Reassign Records to another user?

An underrated feature of Dynamics 365 sitting since a long time is the Reassign Records. This is a particularly important feature that if a key person stayed with the organization for quite some time and worked deeper in Dynamics like written plugins or have workflows owned by them, it is imperative that the records they owned need to be reassigned to someone else when that employee leaves.

Given the scenario – An employee, Somesh, left the company but has several records under his ownership. Even some workflows (we’ll get to that a little further.) Sample Original Records owned by the user –

And when the user leaves the company, in general practice, we revoke the D365 license for reuse. In that case, the user is Disabled in the system –

Important: Before you proceed further, please make a list of all Active workflows which are owned by the Disabled user before Reassigning Records. You can use Advanced Find to find such workflows.

Why should you Reassign Records

Workflows

Since the user who left was owner of any workflows having Scope of Organization level, they’d fail and if them being background workflows, you wouldn’t know what happened in the background. On investigating, you’d see error like –

I noticed that workflows which are set to User scope will behave like they didn’t trigger.

Reassign Records

Use this feature to reassign records of the Disabled User to the new Administrator/User who should carry forward the smooth processing of day to day operations of Dynamics.

Go to the user by going to Settings > Security > Users. Find the user and open the record.
On clicking on Reassign Records as shown above, you’ll be asked whether you want to assign the records to yourself or some other user.
The loading will complete and once you check, all the records that were previously with Somesh will be assigned to Vishal. See below –
The workflows get assigned too. But, you have to do some activity before you say you’re done.

Reactive the Workflows

So, the records got swiftly got assigned to the new user. However, the workflow which Somesh owned were Deactivated, assigned to Vishal but were left Deactivated!