Remove orphan identities in TFS 2010

Question

I am in the process of moving a TFS 2010 installation from one machine to another.

I found that is possible remap identities using TFSConfig Identities /change

Answer 1

Don't clean them up. They are inactive so think of them as tombstones. If you get rid of them, you may experience dangling users (in Access Control Entries or File History for example).

Answer 2

Unfortunately, as is typical with many Microsoft products, the application is lacking many useful features (like a function to delete identities). You can do what I did and manually remove entries from the TFS_Configuration database in the table tbl_security_identity_cache and it will clean them up.

You will have to temporarily disable the foreign key constraints on the table or else you can't delete from it.

I used a statement like:

DELETE FROM tbl_security_identity_cache
WHERE 'display_name' IN
(
    'useless crummy identity 1',
    'useless messy identity 2'
)

and so on

When I searched for how to do this nobody had posted it so here you go.

Answer 3

After doing an upgrade to TFS2012 from TFS2010 that was converted from TFS2008 we have a lot of unneeded identities. The problem is when I do a

tf workspaces /owner:* /collection:%TFB_COLL_12%

I don't get anything but

TF14045: The identity <GUID> is not a recognized identity.

Doing a specific current user, it lists the workspaces.

So while I understand the need to keep old users since they may have changes, the tf workspaces command shouldn't give such an ugly message.