Importing users in D365 Operations using Excel

Let me start off by admitting I was initially thinking about naming this post "Importing users in AX7 using Excel", so there, now this post suddenly became a little bit more "searcher friendly".

In this post I will show how easy you can connect to your Dynamics 365 Operations instance using Excel. Before I begin the post, let me just remind you that importing users from Azure Active Directory is perhaps easier and quicker. So this post is just to show you it is also possible to import users using Excel with the Dynamics Office Add-in.

You may have seen the Data Entity "System User" (SystemUserEntity), and you may have tried using it to add users with it, and  furthermore you may also have seen the error "A row created in data set SystemUser was not published. Error message: Write failed for table row of type 'SystemUserEntity'. Infolog: Error: Error in getting SID."

You will get the same error through Excel if you do not provide some additional columns and information while trying to create a user through that Data Entity.

You can either start off with opening Excel, install the Dynamics Office Add-in and connect it to the target instance. Or you can open the list of users directly on the instance, and open the list in Excel from there. Either way you should start with a view where you have the System User list in your spreadsheet.

The next step is to modify the Design of the view. Click the Design link first.

Then edit the System User table.

Then add the following following columns: Enabled, AccountType and Alias (Email).

Save the design changes and ensure you update the view so the added columns are populated with data.

You will notice the Type (AccountType) and Alias (Email) carry important information for how the user authenticates, in addition to the Provider column. With these columns properly populated, you should be able to add multiple rows and hit a single "Publish" from within Excel.

Given this, you can have two open Excel instances, and connect to two different instances. And then copy over users from a source to a target using Excel. As long as all the columns are available and in the same order, of course.

This post should also give you some clue to how you can use Data Management to populate a system with users through a Data Package, if that is your preference.