Viewing How Users Have Configured CRM

We ran into an issue last week where a user was creating an Order directly, instead of from the Opportunity, where they should have been creating it.  We traced the problem to the fact that the somehow, the user’s CRM profile had been changed and they were seeing navigation items normally hidden from them.

Reporting on your user’s configuration

I created the following process to review how each user had their CRM environment configured.

I started by running the following SQL script:

SELECT

    s.fullname,

    u.homepagearea,

    u.homepagesubarea,

    u.userprofile

FROM

    usersettingsbase u

    INNER JOIN systemuserbase s ON u.systemuserid = s.systemuserid

ORDER BY

    s.fullname

Which results in a report something like this:

So what does this tell us?

Well, the first column is the user’s name, of course.

The second and third columns instruct CRM what to display as the user’s “Home� page when they first start CRM.  These settings are found on the General tab of the Personal Options dialog when the user selects Tools, Options:

The final column defines how the user’s Workplace will appear:

When you select one of the checkboxes in the Select Workplace Areas box, it will add that group to the user’s Workplace area.  The Preview area on the left allows the user to see how the Workplace will look after the changes have been saved.

When you look in the database, the Profile column will contain a comma-delimited list of those groups that should be shown in the Workplace.  Here is the list:

 

Changing the User’s Environment

The only problem with knowing how the user has their CRM environment configured is there is no way to make a global change unless you write an application to do it.  If you don’t feel like writing an application, you’ll need to fix the any issues by logging into CRM as that user.

 

Security Considerations

If you would like to prevent your users from changing their settings, you can remove the Write right from the User Settings section in their security role: