The workflow cannot be published or unpublished by someone who is not its owner error while importing solution in Dynamics 365 CE

Recently after upgrade of our Dynamics 365 CE from 8.2 to 9.1, when the System Administrator tried importing the solution (managed), he got the below error

The workflow cannot be published or unpublished by someone who is not its owner.

Error while importing workflow {ec05f40d-fd14-46ab-96b3-be1f5b108ef3} type Workflow name Marketing List – Update CT Relationship: The workflow cannot be published or unpublished by someone who is not its owner.

What the error says is that the user who is importing the solution needs to be the owner of the workflow that is there in that solution.

http://gonzaloruizcrm.blogspot.com/2011/05/processesworkflow-ownership-faqs.html

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17159920/crm-2011-ru13-the-workflow-cannot-be-published-or-unpublished-by-someone-who-is

The thing was that we have never got this issue earlier for that System Admin user and we would have imported the solution at least 10 times earlier as well. This time the only thing different was that it was in the newer version 9.1

Changing the owner of the workflow and assigning it to the one who is importing will fix this issue. However interestingly and as expected when we tried importing the same solution using a different system administrator (again not the owner of the workflow in the target system), the import was successful with warning.

“The original workflow definition has been deactivated and replaced”

Read the below post to understand how workflows are managed internally

https://www.inogic.com/blog/2010/11/workflows-behind-the-scene/

Please share your thoughts, if someone has faced this issue recently and how they managed to fix this?

And what caused the issue to the first system admin and worked for the other.

Author: Nishant Rana

I love working in and sharing everything about Microsoft.NET technology ! View all posts by Nishant Rana