Managing Users in Dynamics 365

In a recent CRMUGDC meeting Jim Novak talked about creating a new XrmToolBox tool to see users with a specific security role. This will be a helpful tool when it is ready for public use. In the mean time, you can also use Advanced Find for this.

Here are some tools I use to manage my user access inside of Dynamics 365.

Advanced Find for Users with a Specific Role

You can build an Advanced Find like the one below to see users with a specific Security Role. Keep in mind you cannot look for a Security Role lookup as there is a new copy of the role for each business unit. Instead you can search that the name equals the name of the role name.

In my organization, we use this method to check users with System Administrator and Customizer so we can quickly check users who have elevated access. This can be used if you have a dedicated role for other permissions such as Export to Excel. Just keep in mind that System Administrator will always have that access as well.

Advanced Find for Team Membership

I also use Advanced Find to check users in a specific team. This can be a bit faster to check than opening the team. Additionally, this allows me to view from the User list if I need to perform actions on the whole team (ex. add Security Roles).

This can be especially helpful if you also use Field Level Security. If you have FLS turned on for a specific sensitive field and have a team added to that profile, you may want to review those users quickly.

Dashboards

The next step can be to put these views together in a dashboard. Then in a few clicks you can quickly see all this data in one place. This also could allow you to grant non-administrator users access to see this data and provide feedback. Don't forget to share the dashboard and all the views if you are using a personal dashboard.

Report: User Summary

This report is a good tool provided out of the box. It will show you all Security Roles for users by Business Unit. This can be done for all users or for just a selected group (maybe from your Advanced Finds above!). I use this to save current state information in case it is needed later.

XrmToolBox Tools for User Management

While Jim is still finishing off his tool, there are some other tools already available that you can take a look at to see if they meet your needs.

• Access Checker - Select the entity in question, a specific record, and the user then the tool will show you what rights that user had specifically
• User Roles Manager - add or remove roles in bulk. This can be done for all users or based on a view. I have used this to create a view of all users with an existing role and then use the tool to replace this with a new role.
• User Settings Utility - take a look at this tool if you need to change other non-Security Role setting such as number of records per page, Emails sent on behalf of, etc.

Those are some tools I use for managing our user access. What other methods do you use?