When migrating data from your existing solution to Dataverse, one major challenge is handling users – especially when some people have already left the company. To assign records, a user in Entra AD is needed. This means you either need many fake users, or the data can’t be migrated.
With stub users, it is possible to create a system user that does not exist in Entra AD. By importing users, you can establish a placeholder system user who cannot log in but is able to own records.
Create stub users
Stub users may be created using the Web API, Excel or data migration tools. To be able to create a stub user, you need a first name, last name, and email address; however, only the email address is critical for synchronizing standard users.
The email address is critical because if you use the same email address for a stub user and a normal user, the normal user can’t be synchronized to an environment. Currently there is no migration path from a stub user to a normal user, so it is advisable to assign them a fictitious email address. This means normal users can be added without any challenges.
TIP: Add a suffix to the last name when importing these users to clearly indicate they are stub users.
Stub users appear as deactivated users. In PPAC they can be seen in the ‘Disabled Users’ view.
Security roles for stub users
By default, a stub user is assigned the Salesperson security role in a Sales environment and Basic User in other environments. This role typically grants ownership privileges for accounts, contacts, and activities, which in most scenarios provides sufficient access.
By default, disabled users can’t get new roles assigned. So for organisations making use of custom tables, these roles can be modified to include additional tables as needed.
Alternatively, there is a possible to enable role assignment: the organisation setting ‘AllowRoleAssignmentOnDisabledUsers’ enables administrators to assign security roles to disabled users. This way any role can be assigned to stub users if required.
Add stub users to teams
Similar to security roles, stub users cannot be assigned to teams. However, enabling the organization setting ‘AllowDisabledUsersAddedToOwnerTeams’ allows you to do so anyways.
Migrate from a stub user to a normal user
There is no built-in feature to migrate stub users to regular users. However, this can be accomplished by synchronizing the new user, reassigning all relevant records via PPAC, and subsequently deleting the stub user.
By default, users cannot be deleted from an environment. By enabling ‘Delete Disabled Users’ (Environment > Settings > Feature), you can delete these stub users. Deleting exists of two steps, the first removes the user (and disabling it) and the second being a permantly deleting which deletes also the traceability (like their audit history).
