Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Hidden Privileges

A client called us yesterday with a problem. They were unable to export in any way from CRM 4.0 to Excel. They had been able to, and now they couldn’t.

I jumped on their server with full permissions and tried it myself and sure enough I got the ever so useful:

I started looking around at what might be the issue, but drew a blank.

Then I remembered an issue that I had had a couple of weeks earlier where an internal user here at Chorus IT was unable to do something in CRM that they had been able to before. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was a permission/role issue, but even temporarily giving them full admin permissions didn’t do the trick, so I ended up, after reading a couple of other peoples issues, copying the admin role and assigning it, with the result that everything worked!

I tried the same with the clients issue and they were then able to export to Excel.

It seems that this is something to do with some hidden privileges associated with a role.  As a little test, I took away every privilege from the newly created role, but the ability to export to Excel remained, so my feeling that it is a hidden privilege I think is pretty sound.

I would like to know which it is, so I’m just looking in to it, but if you have a similar issue, to resolve it quickly:

1. Copy an admin role
2. Take away all privileges
3. Assign it to users

There are some interesting articles to read on this, especially the one from CRM MVP David Jennaway:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2009/08/04/viewing-all-crm-privileges-including-hidden-privileges.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957976

To grant the privileges back you can run a tool that is available within the Update Rollups

To obtain the tool, manually extract the rollup package. For example, follow the steps:

1. Extract the Rollup package – You’ll see it’s an EXE, so run it and before you click next (which goes through the install process) the files are extracted. Note where they’re extracted to, for example C:\UR12\
2. Start a command prompt.
3. Change directories to drive C by typing the bellowing command:

   cd C:\UR12\tools\granthiddenprivileges\

4. Type Microsoft.Crm.SE.GrantHiddenPrivileges.exe, and then press ENTER

That should re-apply the hidden privileges.