System and application users

There's a list of special system and application users that is created when the system is provisioned. Special system users are created for integration and support scenarios. Application users are created during system provisioning for setup and configuration management. Application users can also be used for performing back-end services and their data access is managed by the special security role that is assigned. These security roles are managed by the system and might not be modifiable. See other system predefined security roles.

Most of these users are hidden from user views but they can be found by using the Advanced Find on the Users table. Don't delete or modify these users including changing or reassigning security role.

System users

Application users

The purpose of the system account?

• The System user is a built-in user account that is used to allow customers to perform system updates via plug-ins.
• The primary usage of this user account is to meet special business requirements that require elevation of privileges; for example, running background processes to integrate with other applications.
• It can also be used to handle rollup scenarios where individual users don't have the required privilege. For example, the priority of a Case is automatically set to the highest priority of an individual user’s tasks and individual users can only update their own task priority but not the Case priority.

Technical details on permissions?

• This user account can perform any actions and has all system privileges.
• Records created/updated by this user account are audited.

Technical details on the security?

• This user account can't sign in to Dynamics 365 apps.
• Administrators have the option to use this user account when registering their plug-ins.
• This user account doesn't have a mailbox, so they can't be used to send or receive emails.
• Since you can't log into the apps using this user account, it doesn't have any related entities (user settings, queues, calendar, team membership, internal address, etc.).
• The details of this user account can't be modified from the User Form interface.
• This user account doesn't show up in any views.

The purpose of the application users?

• The application user is a built-in user account that is used to perform integration and system back-end service to support a particular feature.
• Since these are built-in user accounts, they shouldn't be updated. The security roles that are assigned to these accounts shouldn't be updated either. This is to prevent any service outages.
• These users don't consume any service licenses.