The ability to assign and share records in Dynamics CRM is a powerful area of functionality that can often be overlooked – and when we had a question this morning on whether records in CRM can have multiple owners, I thought this could be a handy area to record a quick article about.
(particularly as this can be a popular topic in the Dynamics CRM Customisation & Configuration Exam as we all get our certifications moved up to CRM 2015 and CRM 2016)
Ownership in CRM
Typically records in CRM can be owned by a particular CRM User, this is governed by the Owner field on the record.
Prior to CRM 2011, this limited each record to being owned by a particular User – however this was changed from CRM 2011 onwards to allow records to be owned by a particular Team in CRM as way of supporting multiple Owners. This allows shared working on a record across a Team in CRM.
Selecting a User or Team in CRM as the Owner of a particular Customer Account
From a security perspective, when a record is owned by a User, this gives that User rights over the record as dedicated by their Security Role(s). Whereas if the record is owned by the Team, this grants User-rights over the record to all members of that Team.
Permissions that a Salesperson might have when working with the Customer Account Entity – only able to Read, Write and Delete an Account record when that Account record is owned by their User, or owned by their Team.
This Owner field, and the ability to assign a record to a User or Team is applicable to any Entity created in CRM where the ‘Ownership’ is set to User or Team.
So if we look at the Entity Definition for the Customer Account Entity in CRM:
Reviewing the Ownership Setting for the Customer Account Entity
We can see here that this entity is configured to allow a Customer Account record to be either assigned to a User in CRM, or a Team in CRM.
As Customer Account is a System Entity in CRM, this cannot be changed – however when we create any new Entity in CRM, we can set the type of Ownership we want for that Entity:
Setting the Type of Ownership for a New Entity in CRM
Organisation Ownership here gives us the option of avoiding any User/Team assignment of records for this Entity – and instead simply have records generally accessible.
This is not ideal for any data that might be User-owned, but can be useful to simplify CRM for Entities that are used across a business, such as ‘base data’ or system-wide selections in the solution.
Understanding Ownership and the difference between User-owned, Team-owned or Organisation-owned records can appear in the Customisation & Configuration Training for Dynamics CRM and so can be a key area for any budding CRM Consultant or Developer to be up to speed on.
Further Reading
Introduction to Entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309396.aspx
Use Access Teams and Owner Teams to Collaborate and Share Information
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dn481569.aspx
How Record-based Security can be used to control access to records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
