How to Transfer Users with active password policy

Question

I want to transfer users from our QA environment to the PROD environment on Sitecore.NET 8.2 (rev. 170728).

It is totally fine if the users are deactivated and have a random password set. Unfortunately it seems like I cannot import any user since the default or empty password does not meet the password policy requirements. How can I import the users?

I do have access to the serialization files, so I can edit them if that helps. On other environments, I temporarily changed the config, but I cannot do that on PROD.

Answer 1

There is a config settings you can use called SerializationPassword.

Just use a config patch file with

<settings>
    <setting name="SerializationPassword" value="Secret!@#" />
</settings>

and deserialize your serialized users after.

Sitecore will set all your new users' passwords to Secret!@# (or whatever value you want) instead of default b which is used when the setting is not present.

You can deserialize you users in PROD and then change they passwords to whatever you want manually.

Answer 2

Sitecore membership is based on ASP.Net membership. It means that you can use same approach for moving users from one DB to another. It is low-level actions with data that could give you better understanding how users/roles information is managed in Sitecore.

1. Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
2. Connect to SQL server with Sitecore Core QA database
3. Click right mouse button on Sitecore Core QA database, select "Generate scripts..." from context menu
4. Select all tables, where name starts with "aspnet_" on first page of wizard
5. Click "Advanced" button on second page of wizard. Select "Types of data to script":"Data only", "Script DROP and CREATE":"Script DROP and CREATE"
6. Generate script
7. Backup Sitecore Core Production Database
8. Run script generated from Core QA database on Core Production database

Answer 3

One addition to Mareks answer:

Unfortunately the logic for passwords in package deserialization is completely different. It uses a class called PasswordGenerator, which is initialized with the following parameters:

MinimumCharacters = 6;
MaximumCharacters = 8;
ConsecutiveCharacters = false;
RepeatCharacters = true;
ExcludeSymbols = true;

So if your password policy requires longer passwords or symbols, this functionality is pretty much unusable.