Salesforce: Sharing without Coding

Salesforce CRM is one of the most concrete, holistic and useful tools out there to enable organizations to unify their marketing and sales data with minimal duplication, track every stage in the customer relationship management journey and monitor the activities of the departments involved in the front and backends of the journey. Salesforce CRM promotes better collaboration between diverse teams and enables businesses to minimize wastage of time, money, efforts and other resources permeating from inaccuracies and inefficiencies in data collation. It makes the arduous process of growth easier by empowering businesses to make their customer relationship management processes (such as sales, marketing, customer support/ service, management, etc.) more efficient and productive, boosting sales and loyalty.

Breaking organizational silos is a core requirement for greater efficiency, effective collaboration and better results. These silos, however, cannot be broken by only collating all the data in a central place like a CRM tool but also by being able to share relevant insights to the right people at the right time. And the question that is most often asked by clients in our experience is, “How does sharing work in Salesforce?”

• Organization Wide Defaults wherein you share the org data with the whole org, not specific individuals or groups, through default settings such as Private, Public Read/Write, Public Full Access, Public Read/Write/Transfer or Controlled by Parent. As sharing happens at the organizational level, the main problem that arises here is that it is difficult to make exceptions here.

• Role Hierarchy wherein the organization’s hierarchy determines who gets access to what data. So, the higher-ups/ reporting officers are able to see records but not those on the team. The main drawback of this method is that it allows only vertical sharing.

• Territory Management wherein you can share records such as new accounts and their opportunities automatically to those in the account’s territory (which can be geographical, product-based or any other account attribute based). The main drawback with this method is that it is difficult to migrate users from one territory to another.

• Sharing Rules wherein records/ data/ objects can be custom shared to users/ groups based on sharing criteria or relationships, enabling horizontal sharing as some users/ groups/ roles may need access to related user fields or objects. However, like the above methods, here again, you do not get to control what happens to the record/ actions performed on it, just the access. For Lookup relationships, sharing inheritance is not possible.  The other problem is that rules are to be defined separately for every user/ group/ role. For instance, if rules are defined for a group of users, out of which one leaves the organization, then, there is a need to go back and change the rules individually.

• Apex Programming wherein you can individually decide who gets access to what records and what actions can be performed on those records by that user/ group/ role. Sharing inheritance for Lookup objects is also a possibility here. However, this method involves extensive coding and is relatively complex, time-taking and expensive.

Yes. Very much. With comprehensive and effective solutions like ShareIT-O, you can share records (including related lists and inheritance) with specific users, groups or roles, restrict actions performed on shared records and promote greater efficiency, collaboration and business outcomes. No arduous coding or confusing formulae or costly processes required. Just 2-3 simple, configurable steps and you are good to go, howsoever complex the business requirement.