Power Platform Center of Excellence Highlight: Request Orphaned Objects Reassigned

The Power Platform Center of Excellence kit has become popular solution for customizing an organization's governance of the platform. With frequent updates and new features, it's easy to miss something that could be beneficial to your organization. My goal is to call out solutions within the CoE kit that are either new or that have been impactful for the companies I work with.

One of the most frequent questions I get from Power Platform admins is: “How do we manage apps and flows when the owner leaves the organization?”.?In the past, there was no clear process for managing those apps and flows that became ownerless.?Fortunately, the CoE kit now provides a clean process for handling this situation.

The “Request Orphaned Objects Reassigned” solution is two workflows (parent/child) that check daily for any apps or flows that have been marked as ownerless.?It attempts to find the manager of the former owner and message them about the abandoned Power Platform objects from their former employee.

The workflow sends an adaptive card using the flow bot which details the apps and flows that are abandoned.?The manager then has a few options for managing these objects, they can: take ownership of all items, assign ownership of all items to someone else, delete all items, send themselves an email with the list of items, or view each item separately to make individual decisions for each item.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: What if a manager can’t be found for a former employee?

A: If a manager isn’t identified for that individual, an email is sent to the email address listed in the environment variable “Admin eMail” and recommends that they used the “Set App Permissions” and “Set Flow Permissions” app from the CoE kit to reassign these objects.

Q: What happens if the manager doesn’t respond to the adaptive card in Teams?

A: By default, the “Post adaptive card” action in the workflow’s timeout setting has been set to PT23H, which is 23 hours.?Once it times out, another message will be sent via Teams telling the manager that the message above has timed out and no responses will be collected.?Because this workflow runs daily by default, the manager will be asked again the following day.

Q: How does the workflow know that an employee has left the organization?

A: The workflow is looking at the Maker dataverse table where “Maker Is Orphaned” is equal to true.?This field is actually populated by a workflow in the core components: “CLEANUP – Admin | Sync Template v3 (Orphaned Makers)”.?If you don’t have this workflow on, then makers will never be marked as orphaned and therefore the object reassignment workflow will never discover anything.