Transferring teams across organizations in Dynamics 365

We often have situations where we come across issues while transferring customizations between environments due to references of teams in views/workflows etc.

For example, we have a custom team created for Approvers. We have a view to filter users that belong to this team and use this view on the form to show only Approvers for the approver field.

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When moving these type of customizations across instances, if we create this custom team manually it won’t be automatically referenced in the views and we’ll have to manually update the references of team at any place in our customizations each time we do a solution import to another instance.

To avoid this, it is best to move the teams across instances so that they have same the GUIDs and any references don’t get affected by change of organization.

We’ll be using XRM Toolbox and the ‘Data Transporter’ plugin to transfer a team from one environment to another.

Go to XRM Toolbox and connect to your source organization. Open Data Transporter and select a Target Organization

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Select ‘Team’ from the list of entities.

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Uncheck the Auto-Mappings (they are checked by default)

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Click on Filters and enter the filter criteria to transfer a specific team (Approvers in this case)

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To get the exact filter criteria, Go to Advanced Find and look for Team with name ‘Approvers’

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Click on Download Fetch XML and open the query

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Select the filter part of the query and paste in the filter section of data transporter

Business Unit is a mandatory field to create a new team. So, we need to create a mapping between the source and target business units. Open the business unit and copy the GUID

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Click on Mappings and enter the GUID mappings for Business Unit.

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Uncheck the below fields from mappings field. As these are lookup fields, without mappings there will be an error. These fields get automatically set on creation of team and hence no need to map them.