Hello everyone,
Situation :
Today I faced a situation with a client which had an issue about their storage on CRM Online. Their instance was getting 5% of storage everyday and they didn't know the root cause of.
They final reason was about workflows crashing and generating hundred thousands of pending workflow records (more than 500 000...).
Since the records were crashing, there was an error message on each, and the out of the box job running in the background was avoiding it.
Here is the query executed for the ootb cleaning jobs for completed tasks :
Root cause :
After investigating, the problem was about the user who was owning each workflow records.
This user was configured to use the Access Mode : Administrative.
This type of Access Mode prevent the user to have access to any data in the CRM. So of course, all workflows were crashing because of data access privileges.
Back to the reason of this article :
So, what about the Administrative Access Mode ?
Users configured with this license type can administer the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server but will not have access to the Sales, Marketing, or Service areas.
This Access Mode will allow the user to do configuration of the CRM instance but nothing related to the data in the 3 sections listed above.
Here is what an Administrative user will see while accessing the CRM :
This user do not consume a license type which is a good point to take into account.
Conclusion :
While using that Access Mode you need to make sure that the user is not used for any data access or make sure that no workflows/jobs are running with a owner in Administrative mode.
This can be really useful to allow a specific user to do few actions and related to users (security roles, teams, business units, ...)
Happy CRM'in
PS : for storage cleaning, MSFT has a great guide here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/free-storage-space