The Importance of Proper User Removal

Recently I wrote an integration using SSIS and the CRM web services that created and updated accounts and contacts in CRM. However, there were some accounts which CRM refused to update returning the following error:

0x80040204 Invalid user auth

Updating the records through IE posed no problems.

Searching the web showed that this error only came up when using impersonation, which I wasn't doing.

After reviewing the data it was determined that the owner of the records had been deleted from Active Directory.

To fix this, all we needed to do was reassign the accounts to a different user and all worked well from then on.

So, it's very important that when users leave the company that their accounts in AD don't get deleted. If this is a procedural requirement for the client, then make sure you re-assign any accounts. This should be done naturally in the process of a user leaving the company but can sometimes get missed.

-M