When an AttachmentExtractor subscription is cancelled, the license will expire on the due date of the subscription. This will cause the service to stop, and no further extraction will occur.
Many customers question “What happens to my extracted content? Can I still access it, and if so, how?” To answer, customers in fact have several options for AttachmentExtractor offboarding and accessing their previously extracted content, as outlined below.
Option 1: Revert Extraction
Customers can configure the service to have all extracted content moved back into their Dynamics 365 database / Dataverse environment. You can change the direction of the service via the Online service configuration. Once the content is moved back, it can be accessed as normal, as if it had never been extracted.
For this option it does not matter if the content is on SharePoint or on Azure Blob – everything will be brought back.
IMPORTANT:
- The amount of time the process takes to move back all previously extracted content depends on the volume of extracted content. Therefore, the process can take a while, and in some cases even months.
- Once brought back in, it will count towards your capacity consumption and potentially incur higher storage costs.
Option 2a: Access content moved to SharePoint
The standard way of accessing content that has been extracted to SharePoint by AttachmentExtractor is via a time-sensitive auth-token. Without a service running, the authentication will not work, because the auth-token cannot be refreshed and it will expire. Click here for additional information on how extracted content to SharePoint is accessed.
Once a customer states that they want to cancel their AttachmentExtractor subscription or deletes their service, this authentication fails due to the expired auth-token. The plugin is no longer able to authenticate to SharePoint. Instead, when a customer goes to open extracted content, this will open a link to the file on SharePoint. This means that the link will be opened in the customer’s browser that they are using, and then the browser is responsible for authenticating.
Recommended: The URL is delivered after the failed attempt. To avoid unnecessary authentication attempts and directly retrieve the URL , please create a settingskey “EnforceUrl” under the AE product.
Please note:
- This only affects content that was moved – all new content that is not extracted is left unchanged.
- You need to leave the plugin that is registered on “retrieve” & “retrievemultiple” for annotations and attachments in place.
Option 2b: Access content moved to Azure Blob
To access files on Azure Blob, you need to provide a SAS token. Learn how to generate a SAS token here. This SAS token is then stored in a settingskey called “ABSSasKey”, which remains even if the service is gone. Customers can simply update the validity of their access key so that the authentication for the plugin remains intact. View this article to learn how to create a settingskey, and this article for more information on how to find and check the value of a settingskey in Dynamics 365.
That covers the three options for AttachmentExtractor offboarding and accessing extracted content.
That’s it! If you would like to give us any feedback, please contact us by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.