Updating Organizationally Owned Entities in Dynamics 365 to User Owned Using CRM Snapshot

Updating Organizationally Owned Entities in Dynamics 365 to User…

February 21, 2019February 21, 2019
by Mike!

A question came up yesterday about how to change an organizationally owned entity to a user / team owned entity in Dynamics 365. The standard answer might be “You can’t” or “Your only option is to recreate the entity with a new name. Copy the existing data to the new entity. Delete the existing organizationally owned entity and then recreate the original organizationally owned entity as User/Team owned and migrate the data back from your holding entity.” That’s a lot to do and hidden within each of those steps are some seriously complicated issues especially if you are using Dynamics 365 online.

As I thought about the question I began to realize that CRM Snapshot may simplify this process somewhat so I sat down to create a video on how one might accomplish this task using the tool. As the question asker mentioned, this sort of thing is not “for the faint of heart” and not something you should ever do in a production environment before testing in a lower environment. A couple of gotchas. Currently CRM Snapshot does not handle restoring createdby, modifiedby and modifiedon values so after running this process you will end up with all of your records Created By and Modified By the SYSTEM user and Modified On the date you restored the records. It will handle Created On for you and things like state and status code.

In the video I show the following.

Create a new solution with a single organizationally owned entity that has an N:1 and 1:N relationship.
Add some data and relationships to that entity.
Create CRM Snapshot Workflow to backup the new entity prior to recreating it as User owned and run that against the records we created using Bulk Workflow Execution in XrmToolBox.
After backing up the records delete the existing organizationally owned entity and recreate it as user / team owned.
Finally, using Bulk Workflow Execution tool in XrmToolBox run the Rollback / Restore workflow against the Snapshot records created in step 2 to restore the data to the new user / team owned entity.