How to import users in CRM 2011 with source GUID

Question

We have three Organization tenents, Dev, Test and Live. All hosted on premise (CRM 2011. [5.0.9690.4376] [DB 5.0.9690.4376]).

Because the way dialogs uses GUIDs to refference record in Lookup, we aim to maintain GUIDs for static records same across all three tenents.

While all other entities are working fine, I am failing to import USERS and also maintain their GUIDS. I am using Export/Import to get the data from Master tenent (Dev) in to the Test and Live tenents. It is very similar to what 'configuration migration tool' does in CRM 2013.

Issue I am facing is that in all other entities I can see the Guid field and hence I map it during the import wizard but no such field shows up in SystemUser entity while running import wizards. For example, with Account, I will export a Account, amend CSV file and import it in the target tenant. When I do this, I map AccountId (from target) to the Account of source and as a result this account's AccountId will be same both in source and target.

At this point, I am about to give up trying but that will cause all dialogs that uses User lookup will fail.

Thank you for your help,

Answer 1

My only suggestion is that you could try to write a small console application that connects to both your source and destination organisations.

Using that you can duplicate the user records from the source to the destination preserving the IDs in the process

I can't say 100% it'll work but I can't immediately think of a reason why it wouldn't. This is assuming all of the users you're copying over don't already existing in your target environments

Answer 2

I prefer to resolve these issues by creating custom workflow activities. For example; you could create a custom workflow activity that returns a user record by an input domain name as a string.

This means your dialogs contain only shared configuration values, e.g. mydomain\james.wood which are used to dynamically find the record you need. Your dialog is then linked to a specific record, but without having the encode the source guid.

Answer 3

Try following steps. I would strongly recommend to try this on a old out of use tenant before trying it on live system. I am not sure if this is supported by MS but it works for me. (Another thing, you will have to manually assign BU and Roles following import)

1. Create advance find. Include all required fields for the SystemUser record. Add criteria that selects list of users you would like to move across.
2. Export
3. Save file as CSV (this will show the first few hidden columns in excel)
4. Rename the Primary Key field (in this case User) and remove all other fields with Do Not Modify.
5. Import file and map this User column (with GUID) to the User from CRM
6. Import file and check GUIDs in both tenants.

Good luck.