No matter how amazing an organisation may be, unfortunately there will always be the possibility of someone leaving the organisation. When it comes to Power Automate, this means that you can be stuck with the original Owner of the Cloud Flow having left the organisation, where Connection References eventually error, and lead to an automated process failing which may be critical to business systems.

Referenced Forever?!

At present, there is no way for you to delete the original Owner of a Cloud Flow even if you manage to establish yourself as a Co-Owner. Connection References cannot necessarily be deleted either!

Workaround

In this example I’ll use the Centre of Excellence Starter Kit environment that I inherited from a previous colleague, and for demo purposes I’m going to modify the Dataverse Legacy Connector as it is currently in the correct state to demo.

Let’s make our Connection References valid, and eventually fix the Cloud Flow by following the below steps for each Connection Reference:

• Head over to https://www.make.powerapps.com (or https://www.make.powerautomate.com depending on when you’re reading this!).
• Navigate to Solutions and scroll right to the bottom to find the Default Solution.
• Find Connection References from the navigation menu.

• Open the Connection Reference that you wish to modify. Hint: Filter by Owner to get to your reference quickly if you have many to search through.
• Click on Edit.
• Select the Dropdown with the existing Connection and re-point it to an existing valid Connection or create a new one.

• Repeat those same steps for every invalid Connection Reference.

But Wait!…

Now there are some caveats to this approach which you should consider during this process:

1. This does not remove the Owner from the flow, but it stops the Owner’s account from being used as a Connection Reference when using a data source in your Cloud flow.
2. In my instructions I asked you to navigate to the Default Solution. For the consultants among us, with great power comes great responsibility. Be careful here, and use the original Unmanaged solution if you can. In most circumstances, you will be presented with Managed solutions and will be forced to use the Default solution.
3. To ensure that you can see the full scope of your solution and automations, you ideally need to be a System Administrator to complete this exercise.