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Reassigning Personal Views - Fun with the MS CRM 4.0 Administration Console

Post Author: Joe D365 |

A client of mine recently contacted me and asked me if there was a way to reassign some personal views that were created by an employee that has since left the organization. The client wanted to know if there was a way to reassign these views without having to login as the departed employee. This seemed like a fairly straightforward request and one that I (thought I) had a solution to.

I told the client to access their Advanced Find and then click on the Saved Views tab. By switching the view in the Saved Views area to 'Active Saved Views' I was confident that the personal views that were created by the user would appear. How wrong I was…

When the client clicked on the SAVED VIEWS tab the only views that were available to them were views that they had created themselves plus some other views that had been shared with the user. There was no sign of the views that were created by the departed employee....

After a bit of research I stumbled upon a toolset in Codeplex that appeared to have the answer to my conundrum: the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Administration Console.

For those not familiar the Admin Console is a little beta program that sits on the CRM server and contains 3 utilities to make the life of the CRM administrator much easier. These utilities deal with Managing Views and Local Data Groups, Comparing and Creating Security Roles, and Granting and Revoking Security Roles. This handy little utility can handle all of those tasks right on the server!

Here is a quick rundown of how to use the CRM Admin Console to reassign personal views:

  1. Launch the CRMAdminDashboard.exe     
  2. Choose your authentication mode (it support IFD, CRM Online and AD auth) and enter your connection and credential details

  3. You will then choose the utility you wish to use. As discussed above, there are 3 utilities in the Admin Console. We will want to choose 'Manage Views and Local Data Groups (Advanced Users Only)'

  4. Click Login!
  5. Your Manage Views and Local Data Groups window will display. First, we need to load our users from the system. Click 'Get Users/Clear Cache' and then select the business units you want to load users from.

  6. After clicking OK, the users will load into the LEFT (source) and RIGHT (destination) columns.

  7. Be aware of the VIEW TYPES checkboxes. This is used to choose the types of views that you want to see. Since we are concerned with a Saved Personal View, we will want to make sure MAIN APPLICATION VIEW (MAV) is selected. (Make sure –FILTER ACTIVE VIEWS is checked otherwise you will not see anything!)


  8. Now that we have MAV and Filter Active Views selected, click on the name of the user in the left column who has the saved views you want to copy. These views should now appear in the MIDDLE column

  9. Once you have highlighted the view you want to reassign in the middle column, select the SOURCE user in the right column. This will be the user that the view is reassigned to.
  10. Now that we have the appropriate choice highlighted, a new action menu will appear under the VIEW TYPES area. This action menu contains the actions that we can perform on the view we selected

  11. We will want to choose the 'ACTIVATE VIEWS FOR SELECTED USERS' option. After clicking the button we will be asked to confirm the view activation. Click YES if all looks good.

  12. Poof! You're all done!

The above steps are just one of the many things that you can do with this great CRM Admin Dashboard tool. You can also clone views, set offline data groups for your entire organization (!), compare security roles, compare available views…there is a ton of great stuff in this little tool! I know that this a tool that I will be using a lot of in the future (and it is also a tool I wish I knew about last year!)

Download it for yourself here:

http://crm40admin.codeplex.com/

Happy CRM'ing!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

5 comments on “Reassigning Personal Views - Fun with the MS CRM 4.0 Administration Console”

  1. when try to activate the views to the other user as instructed but the admin console is displaying o views are activated.
    could some one please help me to activate the personal views to the other user when the user left the organization.

  2. This does not Reassign the owner of the view, just shares the view to other users, correct?

    1. HI David - correct. I believe this shares the views and does not re-assign. However - this blog is fairly old so may be worth re-testing just to verify.

  3. Does this still work with CRM 2015 Online? Looking for a solution to this problem since the "Reassign Records" button apparently does not reassign saved personal views.

    1. Hi Brianna - the above does not work wtih 2015 online. HOwever, take a look at this:
      http://crm2011ldgmanager.codeplex.com/ It may need a bit of tweaking to run in 2015 online as the plugins need to run in the sandbox for crm online. But we have deployed this in crm 2015 on premises.

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