Tuesday 25 October 2016

Importing CRM solution - Workflow owner

 I am importing a solution that contains processes and it fails with this error message “The workflow cannot be published or unpublished by someone who is not its owner”. What is wrong?

If your solution contains a process that already exists in the organization and is activated then solution import will attempt to update it. In order to do so, it must first deactivate it. However, if the owner of the activated process is not the same as the user who is importing the solution, then deactivating the process will fail. Therefore you have a few options to fix this problem:

1.       Import the solution using the user who owns the activated process. This can be tricky, especially if there are multiple processes owned by different users which need to be updated by the solution import.

2.       Verify which processes are included in the solution, and then find them in the organization, if you can find them and they are not owned by you then you must assign them to yourself. You can reassign them to the original user after you import the solution; however, you will have to ask the process owners to activate it themselves.



Why can’t I activate/deactivate someone else’s workflow, even if I am the system administrator?

For the same security reason as explained above. You want the workflow owner to explicitly acknowledge that a workflow will be activated and will perform some actions on his behalf. You would not want to allow another user (even the system administrator) to decide that some process should be executed on another user’s behalf. If you want to activate/deactivate someone else’s process you must first assign it to yourself.