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About Product Group Visibility

The purpose of product group visibility is to allow one product group, also known as a business product line, to control the sharing of information with other product groups, especially among corporate and investment banks. This functionality for matrix-based organizations is fundamental to such banks because of the need to follow regulatory requirements and to maintain privacy between select product groups. As preconfigured, product group visibility applies to the following Siebel Finance objects:

• Opportunity
• Contact
• Call Report
• Activity
• Opportunity Note
• Account Team
• Contact Team

Product group visibility has important characteristics:

• Product group visibility is an additional visibility type that sits on top of existing visibility control rules and permits visibility to be applied properly to matrix-based organizations.
• Two types of views show product group visibility:
  • "My Product Group's Record" (where Record is Opportunity, Contact, Call Report, or Activity) are read-only views and show only objects that are directly related to my product group. Some views let you drill-down to detail views.
  • Detail views (such as Opportunity Notes View, Contact Coverage Team, and Account Coverage Team) show all objects for which you have product group visibility permissions (you are on the product group associated to the object, in a product group that has shared visibility with one of the object's product groups, or the object is Public). Detail views are editable.
• When a product group is associated with an object and that product group has specified that its information is to be shared with other product groups, then these other product groups can access or view the object. Currently this feature is available in 3LN Views namely FINS CI Opportunity Note View, FINS CI Contact Coverage Team View & FINS CI Account Coverage Team View. This feature does not cascade. It is single-level sharing. For example, if product group FX shares with product group Equity, and Equity shares with product group Cash, then adding FX to an opportunity note gives access to Equity but does not give access to Cash. For the Opportunity, Contact, Call Report and Activity objects, product group visibility is operational only when the product group that you are sharing the object with is physically added to the Product Group field of the object. For example, to share an Opportunity with a specific product group, that product group must be added to the Product Group field of the Opportunity.
• Product groups are assigned to positions. An employee's product group is the product group associated with the employee's primary position.
• Activity, Call Report, Opportunity, and Opportunity Note records have Public Flag, which is a field associated with each object of these types. Product group visibility rules apply only when Public Flag is not selected. The default value of Public Flag is derived from Confidential Flag of the creator's product group when the object is created. While upgrading, all existing records have the flag value of Y. The value of Confidential Flag in a product group is examined only to default Public Flag at the time of creation of the object. Afterwards only Public Flag is used for determining the visibility.
• For Account Team and Contact Team, product group visibility applies when the creator's product group has selected Suppress Flag. No flag is at the record level, in contrast with the case of Activities and the other objects. Instead, here Suppress Flag of the product group of the creator determines the visibility.
• The product group information associated with a certain object is created when a new record of that object is committed. This is done through a Business Service call invoked by Runtime Events.