Owners, Assignment, and Sharing
These three concepts can get fairly confusing if you think about them too hard. They are, however, actually really quite simple. An Owner of a record is the key User associated with that record. By default, the Owner will be the User who created the record. Not all records have Owners; for example, in the Sales area Products and Competitors don't have owners. However, Leads, Opportunities, Accounts, Contacts, Quotes, Orders, and Invoices do. Sales Literature records don't have Owners per se, but they do have an Employee Contact, which represents the User for maintaining that content. Most records can be owned by a User.
Records in Microsoft CRM have one and only one Owner at any given time. You can change the owner of a record by assigning it to a new Owner (if you have the privilege to do so), but it will always have only one Owner. So, the Owner is the same as the person to whom the record is assigned. Any number of users can be given access to the record through Sharing. When you share a record, you are adding the user(s) to a list of users with whom the record is shared. The list of who the record has been shared with can be found under the record's Actions menu by clicking Sharing. Records can also be shared with Teams. Teams are groups of users.
NOTEOn the Administration tab of many of the records it appears that you can click the magnifying glass (look up icon) next to the owner's name to assign a new owner to the record. However, this is not the case. You actually have to use the Assign option on the Actions menus. |
Sharing records is a privilege that is dependent on the user's role. When you share a record, you are presented with options to determine the amount of control the user will have over the record. This is illustrated in Figure 5.16.
Figure 5.16. Sharing a contact record with a User.
