What happens with a Fabric component if the owner leaves the project?

[amaaiia]

I have a few questions about what might happen if the owner and developer of a project in Fabric leaves the project:

1. What happens if the connections are authenticated with his own Organizational Account?

2. What happens if the owner of a Data Pipelilne, Dataflow, Lakehouse, etc, leaves the project? The owner cannot be changed, will these components still work well?

3. Semantic model connection to data is done by organizational account. If the user used to create the connectionn leaves the project, what happens? In this case, is better to use Service Principal?

I really would like to know what do we need to pay attention to when a member of the team leaves the project, just to ensure everything keeps working well.

[amaaiia]

Hi @v-nikhilan-msft ,

Appart from data connections, what happens with Data Pipelines scheduled runs if pipeline creator user leaves the project? I've done some testing and I've seen that when you schedule a daily run for an specific pipeline, pipeline takes the role of the user that has scheduled the run. Imagine I have 50 pipelines running and suddenly I leave the project. The pipelines won't work anymore. Isn't there a way to have a superuser to run scheduled pipelines?

[v-nikhilan-msft]

Hi @amaaiia 
Currently there is no way to have a super user to schedule the pipelines. But if you want this feature to be enabled, you can provide the feedback:
Appreciate if you could share the feedback on our feedback channel. Which would be open for the user community to upvote & comment on. This allows our product teams to effectively prioritize your request against our existing feature backlog and gives insight into the potential impact of implementing the suggested feature.

Hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further queries.

[v-nikhilan-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @amaaiia 
Thanks for using Fabric Community.

Connections Authenticated with Organizational Account:
If the connections in Fabric are authenticated with an individual’s Organizational Account, and that individual leaves the project, the connections may stop working. This is because the authentication relies on the credentials of the Organizational Account. If the account is deactivated or its credentials are changed, the connections will fail. Therefore, it’s recommended to use service accounts or service principals for such connections.

Owner of Data Pipeline, Dataflow, Lakehouse leaves the Project:
If the owner of a Data Pipeline, Dataflow, Lakehouse, etc., leaves the project, these components should still work as expected. The components in Fabric are not tied to the individual user who created them, but to the workspace in which they were created. However, it’s important to ensure that all necessary access rights and permissions are transferred to other team members before the owner leaves.

Semantic Model Connection Done by Organizational Account: If the Semantic model connection to data is done by an organizational account and the user leaves the project, the connection may stop working. This is similar to the first point above. In this case, it is indeed better to use a Service Principal. Service Principals are not tied to an individual user and their lifecycle is independent of user accounts15. This makes them a more reliable choice for long-lived, automated processes.

When a member of the team leaves the project, it’s important to ensure a smooth transition. This includes transferring knowledge, redistributing responsibilities, updating documentation, and revising access rights and permissions.

For more information please refer to these links:
Give users access to workspaces - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Workspace identity - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Roles in workspaces in Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Share items in Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Microsoft Fabric adoption roadmap: Content ownership and management - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.