Editor's Note: The following MVP Monday post is by Dynamics CRM MVP Donna Edwards
Those of us who deploy, administer or configure CRM know that updating Security Roles can be a time consuming process. We also know that It doesn’t take long for security role updates to become laborious, tedious and honestly, I make us wish we could spend our time doing other, more fun things in CRM.
So what’s a customizer to do? You guessed it, my good friend and fellow MVP Tanguy to the rescue. Tanguy created a nice Role Updater utility and made it available to the community for use. I use it and love it so here’s a high level walk-through.
First, you will need to download the utility and save it to a folder. You can then open the folder and run the Role Updater application.
You’ll first receive a Welcome screen. Here you will click on the Select your CRM 2011 Organization and create a New Connection:
Select the Create New Connection button and enter the information requested. You can mouse over the fields to display information regarding the values needed for each field.
Your connection information will be saved for future use.
You will see a list of security roles available after the connection is made. You can select All, one or hold the CNTRL key to select multiple.
You can now select Privileges you want to modify from the list on the right, choose the Level and select Next when you are finished.
It is that simple. Once your updates are complete, in my case it took only a few seconds, you can continue configuring additional privileges or exit the tool. Although it is not necessary, I generally like to spot check the roles to ensure updates were made as expected.
Let’s do a little calculation to discover how many clicks this tool save me. In 99.9 % of my implementations, I recommend to the client that we remove the delete rights from all security roles for all entities and activities. My recommendation is to use the Close / Cancel for Activities and Deactivate option to remove records from view rather than delete. The reason is pretty obvious, deactivating or closing a record is recoverable, deleting is not. Considering this change only, the tool saves me at least 20 clicks per security role. If I have to change 10 roles, well, that’s 200 clicks.
This is a terrific time saver when implementing a new CRM system, a new Custom Entity or any time that you have multiple changes to Security Roles. This is now my ‘Go To’ tool for Security Role changes.
About the author
Donna has received the Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP award since 2009. She has been working in the Information Technology field for more than 10 years and has a diverse background in technology to include Software Release Management, Ecommerce Web Design and Management, and Enterprise Software Project Implementations.
Donna’s skill set has allowed her to successfully support Organizations in realizing significant return on investment (ROI) through business process analysis, implementing enterprise software systems that fit the organization’s needs, and re-engineering, streamlining and automating business processes. Connect with Donna via her blog and LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter
About MVP Mondays
The MVP Monday Series is created by Melissa Travers. In this series we work to provide readers with a guest post from an MVP every Monday. Melissa is a Community Program Manager for Dynamics, Excel, Office 365, Platforms and SharePoint in the United States. She has been working with MVPs since her early days as Microsoft Exchange Support Engineer when MVPs would answer all the questions in the old newsgroups before she could get to them