I want to bring up the dangerous side effect when using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 User Reassign Records function. The User Reassign Records function assigns all the records owned by the current user or team. To access this function – open a CRM user record and then click on the “Reassign Records” button:
It is powerful – with just one button click ALL Records owned by the current user are reassigned including those activities that are completed, opportunities that are won, cases that are closed, etc. There is even a warning note on the window: “Note that this will move all records owned by the selected user or group regardless of state”.
In most cases, changing the value of historical records is a bad practice. For example changing the Owner information of a Won Opportunity or changing the Owner of a Qualified Lead record. If you have reports that are based on the Owners of these records, then those reports are flawed.
So what should we do instead – I would recommend using Advanced Find to search for all the records needing to re-assign that meets your criteria (such as only the Open Activities, Open Opportunities, Open Cases, etc.) and then perform the assignment. This approach does take more time – but will yield the exact result you desired, no potential side effect. If needed a more automatic solution – then I would recommend investing in a migration tool such as Scribe.
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Frank Lee, Microsoft CRM MVP since 2006
Workopia
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Blog 
thanks for this very informed article. I am working on a project where we are introducing a new Business unit and hence need to move about 30% (around 60K) contact to new Owner. with your suggestion, I can segment contact in advance find and then start re-assigning contacts. However, I can only apply this to maximum 250 contacts at a time. This means 60K users will take me some time to go through. Is there any easier solution to change owner of contacts in one go? bases on advance find?
I am getting the below error while changing the owner of the Open Lead record, not for all the Lead records for only few records it is showing like this “Insufficient Permission” You do not have permission to access these records. Contact your Microsoft Dynamics CRM administrator. I am the Administrator but it is showing like this. could you let me know the solution for this? I have tried my best but I am not able to solve this one.