User and Team Management
User management is the area of Microsoft CRM used to:
- Create and maintain user accounts and profiles.
- Assign roles to a user.
- Indicate for which business unit a user works.
- Indicate who a user’s direct manager is.
A team is an organizational structure in Microsoft CRM designed to allow groups of users across business units to easily share customer information and work together to meet customer needs.
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Definition of Terms
User: Any person who works for a business unit who uses Microsoft CRM. Each user has a user account. All users must be associated with only one business unit. This association controls which customer data the user has access to. Included in the user’s account is information such as the user's telephone numbers, e-mail address, and a link to the user's manager. Each user has privileges and rights to manage their own personal settings. Each user corresponds to a user in Active Directory for that organization.
Team: A group of users. This organizational structure is designed to allow groups of users across an organization to easily share information and work together. Each team must be associated with only one business unit. A team can include users from any business unit, not just the one the business unit the team is associated with. Users can be associated with more than one team.
Manager: A manager can add new users, create and execute queries on users, and perform actions on one or more users. A managing user with Parent: Child Business Units privileges can create users and assign them to any business unit in the hierarchy. A managing user with Business Unit privileges can manage users only within their own business unit.
Classes
The following table describes the classes of the user and team management objects.
| Class | Description |
| BizTeam | Methods to manage teams |
| BizUser | Methods to manage users |
Details
Managing users involves many different activities, including adding users, setting security roles, and placing users into a reporting hierarchy. Access to each of these features is protected by security privileges that the user has based on the user’s security role. A user profile must first be created and saved before the user can be assigned security roles or associated with teams.
A Microsoft CRM user account can be either Enabled or Disabled. Microsoft CRM will allow only Enabled users with a paid license to log on to Microsoft CRM. A user’s account can be set to Disabled for keeping track of historical information (for example, a salesperson who left the company) or to remove them from workflow processes (for example, if they are on vacation).
The following are the basic operations for a user: Create, Enable, Disable, Set Parent (manager), Set Business, Retrieve and Update. For more information, on actions, see the Actions on Objects section.
A team is a group of users who are called team members. A team must report to a business unit, but team members are not necessarily from this business unit. Creating a team allows greater flexibility for sharing and collaboration.
The main use of a team is for efficiently sharing business objects with a group of users. A user can share business objects with a team or can assign business objects to a team. Any object owned by a team is automatically accessible to any user assigned to that team (as if the object were assigned to them.).
The forming of teams is to allow data sharing. For example, if a user has the right to create cases, but can only read orders, they will have those same rights for objects owned by a team they are assigned to.
Note The Microsoft CRM application does not support business-object assignment to teams.
The following are the basic operations for a team: Create, Add and Remove Members, Retrieve and Update. For more information on actions, see the Actions on Objects section.
Once a team is created, users and objects are assigned to it; the rest is automatic. Users will automatically have access to the team’s information and be able to act on it as if it were directly assigned to them.
Sharing
Sharing is the way Microsoft CRM users can give other users access to customer information on an individual basis. For example, a salesperson might choose to share an opportunity with another salesperson so that they can both track the progress of an important sale.
The Microsoft CRM SDK provides methods for sharing objects. A user must have Share rights to share customer-related objects, such as Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, Cases, and Orders, with any other user in the system. When an object is shared, you can specify the rights to grant for the shared object. You can also choose to share all objects associated with the object being shared.