Understanding the Impact of Deleting Users in AX 2012

The big question many people asks. What is the best practice for managing users in your AX environment? This article will explain the impact of deleting a user from AX and how to determine what is the best practice for this specific topic.  

Best practice on how to manage users in your AX environment is based on your auditing requirements. Most importantly, you want to make sure that upon the termination of a user, you disable the AD and AX account A.S.A.P, this way the user can’t access your systems. Speak with the person in charge of auditing or your security team and find out what do your auditors require. If they require you to delete the user accounts, then that is the best practice for your business.  

Impact of Deleting Users:

If your organization will practice deleting users in AX, then it is important to understand the impact. Some misconceptions are that, if a user is deleted, all their transaction history will be lost. This is not true; the transaction history will remain even if you delete the user account. However, you do want to conceder checking a few things before deleting or disabling a user.  

1st If the user is part of a workflow and the workflow uses the actual user ID to operate. Then you must make sure you adjust the workflow before disabling the user. Otherwise, any workflow needed this user’s approval will error out.  

2nd If the user has created any batch jobs, and these batch jobs are scheduled to run and are necessary for business processes. You will have to recreate these batch jobs to use and active user account.  

This is why you need to create the batch job using a service account instead of a user account.  

3rd Expenses, once again depending on how your organization wishes to handle this. If the user is required to enter in their expenses into Enterprise Portal, you will not be able to delete or disable this user until this is done. That being said the standard practice is that the last expense is submitted manually by the users or that users manager.

Impact of Disabling Users:

The same concerns I mentioned above for deleting a user, are also affected if you disable a user. You should watch out for 1st, 2nd and 3rd in this case as well.   

What’s the difference between Deleting a user or Disabling a user:  

The intended use between deleting or disabling a user is, if you have a user that might be a temp or seasonal worker. This user would not be deleted and re-imported every time. You would want to disable the account and reactivate it as needed.  

If a user is terminated with no intent of returning, then you may want to delete this user because there is no reason for keeping that account around.  

A good rule of thumb is, if you are planning on deleting the AD account, delete the AX account first. The AX account is linked to the AD account, so it is useless without the AD account anyways. In fact the AX account should be disabled or deleted prior to the AD account being deleted, otherwise you will have errors on AX that the AD account doesn't exist. in this case, you will have to remove the user using x++ code or SQL.