I recently got a call from a company that was having issues running their workflows on Dynamics CRM 4.0. Despite being configured correctly, their workflows hadn’t processed for more than 4 months! After a quick remote session, we quickly determined the source of the issue.
Earlier in the year, this company had restructured their staff. During this process they had disabled the user account of a key former employee that was the owner of all the workflows.
What was the lesson learned? Disabling the Owner user account of a workflow will disable the workflow jobs as well. Workflows require an active user account to process the jobs. When developing workflows for an organization, make sure all of the published workflows are owned by an administrative account, and not an employee.
Dynamics CRM 4.0 does warn you of this fact while disabling a user (see screenshot below).
Disabling a User in Dynamics CRM 4.0
Unfortunately for my client, all of their workflow activity during the downtime could not be recovered, despite having finally re-enabled the workflows. Again, as a Dynamics CRM Consultant, be sure to educate your clients of this fact.
