If anything that follows is stuff you already know, I apologise. I'm
always conscious that these sorts of threads are not oly read by the
original participants but by others who find them later through search
engines etc, so I feel it is better to give complete coverage.
In you scenario, you have two pairs of people. You don't state whether
they already have access to one another's contacts through their
security roles, but I'll assume they have, for the moment.
So, point one: If Steve is the owner of a contact record and shares that
record with John, Steve is still the only owner of it but he has given
John additional rights to access it that he may not have already had.
Sharing does *not* mean multiple ownership. The owner is a single lookup
field, that does not change with sharing at all.
Point two: sharing does also cascade rights to related records (in a
configurable fashion). So even if John and Steve can see all of each
others contacts, they might not have access to all of each others phone
records for those contacts. Sharing a contact would help here as it
would also confer those rights to see related activities. It still does
not change the ownership of anything.
Point 3: in Outlook you can edit your "local data groups" to anything
you want. Default is to synch contacts you own, but it is perfectly
possible to do this as a query for:
Owner = Me, OR owner = Steve
Or things like:
Contact > <related record> parent Account > owner = me (even if some
other member of staff owns the contact record)
Contact > <related record> owner (user) > manager = me (so I have a
record of contacts of all staff working for me, so I can deal directly
with them if necessary)
This does not require sharing, but does of course require rights to see
those records (you will get the intersection subset of your query and
records you can access).
Point 4: your scenario involves simple pairs of people, in reality this
might often be larger groups who also change around now and again. Using
Teams would help here. Note: teams confer no rights, ownership or
anything else in themselves but do allow you to share to members of a
team rather than named users. When team membership changes, the implied
rights change (you don't have to remember to unshare loads of records).
This is especially useful for sharing custom views as well.
Some more info about how Outlook synchronises records and details like
what happens with conflicting changes, or if a non-owner deletes a
record etc. Useful reading:
http://wp.me/p2I5L-4K
Hope this helps
Adam
Post by Lon OrensteinI agree that your strategy is viable in some cases but in many cases,
Ron's correct about auto-sharing.
Here's a use case: a mortgage broker has 10 people in his office -- 3
admin/processors and 7 brokers. Four of the brokers are on two teams and
want to share contacts. For example, Steve and John are on the A Group
and Bob and Mary are on the B Group. Each team wants to not only see the
contacts their partner enters but they both want the contacts to synch
to their Outlook contacts folder. Isn't sharing the contacts the only
way of achieving that? And, when Steve enters a contact, he has to
manually share it with John.
I've heard of consultants writing a plugin so they could use a workflow
to accomplish this but I don't know how it would work in CRM Online.
Any takers?
Thanks,
Lon
Post by AdamVI think you may be looking at this the wrong way.
Sharing is great for ad-hoc visibility of records you don't own, but
if this is something you want to apply to all records of a type you
should take a different approach using the proper allocating of
permissions via security roles.
One of the built in roles in Dynamics CRM 4 is the "Salesperson" role.
I would expect all your sales people to be assigned to that role (a
user can be assigned to more than one role if they have different
jobs, incidentally).
The default permissions for the salesperson role are to allow
modification of all contacts and leads (and lots of other things)
across the whole organisation.
So either your people don't have the right roles, or the roles have
the wrong permissions.
To check and fix a user's roles, go to settings > Administration >
Users, select (open) a user record and go to the Roles section on the
left. Make sure the roles listed are appropriate for that person.
If you want to add the salesperson role to multiple people, select
them in the grid view of users, go to more actions > manage roles and
check the box for salesperson, then click OK.
To check the permissions assigned to a role, go to Settings >
Administration > Security Roles, choose "salesperson" and check
(firstly) the "Core records" tab. For Leads and Contacts you should
see whole green circles in the read and write columns, indicating that
users with this role can read and amend any of these records across
your whole organisation.
Of course, you can customise this to be more granular, for example by
copying the default role to a new one which has reduced permissions
(maybe read-only rather than write for other people's contacts) and
assigning this role to some users instead.
I hope this helps.
Post back if you have further questions
Adam Vero
MCT, MBMSS:Dynamics CRM 4 Applications
Post by Ron DeSerranno [Mobiform]We have a small sales group using CRM. When a new contact or lead is created
it's owner is assigned to the user that created it....fine. We have to then
manually share the contact or lead so it is visible by others in the group
who may need the info.
How can a contact or lead be automatically shared when it is created.
Found no obvious way...tried workflow briefly.
Thoughts?
RD