Wednesday, July 1, 2009

CRM 4.0 Auto Sharing wizard




CRM 4.0 permission mechanism and access level rules can be quite limiting. This is especially true when privacy of data is required, visibility of records depends on business decisions or visibility depends on the source (role or user) which triggered the action. On other occasions you need to control visibility of record across sibling business units and business units that are not under the same branch.

Most customers overcome the problem by granting organization access to roles which needs work with data. Of course this is very problematic and reduces the security to minimum and so they usually start looking for solution like field level security which enables the organization to hide certain entity fields from a specific business unit, role or user.

Dynamics does address this problem using a mechanism called sharing. The problem with the sharing mechanism is that it’s a manual process which shifts the responsibility of sharing to the user. This behavior is rarely acceptable especially because sharing rules needs to adhere to specific business decisions and sharing logic.

I’ve seen some very interesting solutions that use dynamics workflow engine to facilitate the sharing of records. However we needed a comprehensive solution and so we developed the Auto Sharing wizard which addresses most scenarios (all of ours anyway).

Following is a technical description of the Auto Sharing wizard and what it can do for you.

1.Creation of Global Sharing rules - Fired by anyone (We use them as sharing templates and override with specific rules).
a.When the record is created
b.When the record match a specific snapshot (state)

2.Creation of Specific Sharing rules - Fired only when the current user or user role matches the sharing rule source (see video)
a.When the record is created
b.When the record match a specific snapshot (state)

3.Creation of a Sharing hierarchy e.g. Rules setup as global fire first  Rule setup at the Role level may override or add more sharing rules  Rule setup at the User Level overrides the Role level rules and used as Sharing rule exceptions.

4.Creation of Sharing rules that are integrated as a workflow step

Following is a list of scenarios that can be resolved using the wizard

Sharing of record only when a specific Role or User triggers the action
Conditional sharing either by using a snapshot query or by integrating the sharing rule in an “IF” workflow routine.
Sharing Record with lower non privileged business units, roles and users
Sharing Records with sibling Business units and Business unit that are not under the same branch

ASW Presentation – in order to rewind click on the flash movie; then rewind and play.



If you have questions regarding the wizard feel free to ask them here or send them to support@gicrm.com

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