Recently, I heard from a friend who had faced a major issue in their CRM system — one that could easily turn into a nightmare if you’re not prepared.
If you’ve ever worked with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, you’ll know that products can be inactivated (retired) when they’re no longer needed. But what happens if you need to reactivate a product that was retired? You’d expect it to be simple, but surprisingly, it’s not possible out of the box (OOB).
Here’s what happened — and what you can do if you ever face this problem in your live environment.
The Problem
They found a critical product had been retired by mistake. When they tried to reactivate it, there was no way to bring it back using standard CRM functionality.
They were stuck — and with the product inactive, it wasn’t showing up where it was needed, impacting real business processes.
What They Did
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First, they assessed the issue and confirmed: no OOB (out-of-the-box) way exists to reactivate retired products.
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Next, they raised a support ticket with Microsoft. Microsoft’s team ran a backend script to move the product’s status from Retired back to Draft.
At this point, things looked better — the product was visible again.
But...
The Hidden Problem
When trying to use the product — like adding it to a cart — errors popped up:
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"An error occurred while saving the {0} property instance."
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"Specified argument was out of range of valid values. Parameter name: value."
Confusing, right?
It turned out that while the product was moved to Draft, one of its Product Properties — a field related to the product — was still inactive.
CRM didn’t like that mismatch.
The Real Fix
They went back to Microsoft support, flagged the new issue, and explained what they had found.
Microsoft’s engineers:
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Ran a test script in UAT (test environment) to reactivate the inactive Product Property.
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After confirming everything worked there, they ran the script in the Live environment.
Finally, the errors were gone. The product could be used normally again — just like before it was retired.
Key Takeaways
If this ever happens to you:
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You can’t reactivate a retired product OOB — Microsoft support is needed.
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Simply changing the product status isn’t enough — check the related Product Properties too.
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Raise a detailed support ticket and suggest checking Product Properties if you hit errors.
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Test fixes in UAT first before applying anything live.
It’s one of those hidden challenges that can trip you up if you’re not careful. Hopefully, if you ever end up in a similar situation, this story will save you hours of troubleshooting!
