Reassigning personal views for disabled CRM users

The ability to share personal views in CRM with other users in CRM is a powerful tool. It allows for a central admin users to create or assist other users with creating views and thereafter they can be assigned to individual users or to a group of users. When sharing these views the user has the ability to limit the permissions on the shared views. For example, you may want to share a view but prevent the users who this view has been shared with from deleting the view. That can make sense especially in cases where the shared view is shared amongst a group of users and you do not want to give any individual user the arbitrary opportunity to accidentally or intentionally delete that view and inadvertently have that action ripple across the organization.

This all works very nicely... until the power user who has assigned all his/her views to other users leaves the organization and you want to manipulate these shared views in cases where that manipulation (write, delete, share to others) has been limited. One obvious solution is to have the IT admin temporarily update the AD credentials for this user so you can log into CRM as this user and re-assign the views to a new power user.

But the above action is not always an option. And fortunately there is another better option. Enter the Microsoft CRM 4.0 Administration Console. This console has a number of useful functions including tools for managing security roles but we are just going to focus on the ability to copy personal views for the specific scenario mentioned in this write up.

Below are the steps to copy the personal views:

• Download the console from codeplex
• Launch and enter the credentials and select the "Manage Views" utility

• In the ensuing form, first select "Get Users/Clear Cache". You can click just click Ok to select all users in the organization or you can filter by Business Unit

• Then perform the following steps to assign views from one user to another user
• In View Types ensure only "Main Application View (MAV)" view and "- Filter Active Views" are selected
• Right Column: Select the user you wish to assign from
• Middle Column: Select the view or views you wish to assign (use Ctrl and Shift for multi-select)
• Right Column: Select the user or users you wish to assign the views to (use Ctrl and Shift for multi-select)
• Click "Activate Views for Selected Users" and Confirm