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Administering Oracle CRM On Demand > User Management and Access Controls > Group Management

Group Management

Group Management is an optional feature that gives your company the ability to set up teams of people who work together, allowing them to share a common set of information.

Setting up groups at your company allows users to do the following:

• Group members can access group calendars and task lists, as follows:
  • Any appointment that is owned by a member of a group or has a member of the group on the activity team is visible to all members of the group in the merged calendar in the Group tab in the daily, weekly, and monthly calendar views, unless the appointment is marked as private. The merged calendar shows the availability for all members in the group, and allows employees to determine the best time to schedule appointments and to notify employees (and contacts) of appointments. Group members can also view the individual calendars of other members of the group, in the User tab in the Calendar page.

    NOTE: Users must have the Share Calendar privilege assigned to their role to be able to access the merged group calendar. Users who have the Share Calendar privilege can also set up custom calendar views. For more information, see Viewing the Calendars of Other Users and Adding Custom Calendar Views.

  • Any task that is owned by a member of a group or has a member of the group on the activity team is visible to all members of the group in the task lists in the Group Tasks tab in the Calendar page, unless the task is marked as private.
• Group members can share ownership of the following record types automatically:
  • Account
  • Contact
  • Household
  • Opportunity
  • Portfolio

    When a record of any of these record types is assigned to a member of a group, all members of the group become joint owners of the record.

    NOTE: If a contact is marked as private, then the details of the contact record cannot be read by other group members.

    For example, if a user belongs to group XYZ, then any account that is assigned to the user after the user becomes a member of the group is included in the account lists for all members of group XYZ. On such records, the group name appears in the Primary Group field if this field is present on the Detail page layout. All of the members of the group, including the designated owner of the record, appear in the Team related information section on the record Detail page. All members of the group can update the record.

    By default, the current group's members have full access to group records that were assigned to a group member after the member joined the group.

    NOTE: For this functionality to work, the Default Group Assignment option in the Company Profile page must be selected. The option must be selected before the groups are created. For more information, see Setting Up Groups.

This behavior applies to groups:

• Each user can belong to only one group.

  After a user is added to a group, his name no longer appears on the user list when selecting group members.

• If you select the group assignment option at your company:
  • Records that exist before a group is defined are not updated unless the Owner field is updated with a new owner belonging to a group.
  • When a user joins a group, the user gains access to the group's records. However, records owned by the new group member prior to the user joining the group are not automatically visible to the existing group members. If a user becomes the owner of records after the user is added to a group, the new records are visible to other group members.

    The following example illustrates group record ownership:

    • User 1 and User 2 belong to Group 1. User 3 does not belong to Group 1.
    • User 3 owns Account 31. User 1 and User 2 will not have access to Account 31.
    • User 3 is added to Group 1. User 1 and User 2 still will not have access to Account 31.
    • User 3 becomes owner of Account 32. User 1 and User 2 will have access to Account 32.
• If users are deleted from a group, they are removed from all shared records that the group owns. They retain access to their private records.

  NOTE: If the name of the user who is deleted from the group appears in the Owner field on a shared record that the group owns, then the name in the Owner field on that record is changed to the name of another member of the group after the previous owner is deleted from the group. When such a change is made to the ownership of an opportunity record or a portfolio record, the system fields that store information about the most recent change to the record are updated, and the information shows that the record was updated by the Oracle Administrator user. However, in the case of the other record types that support groups, the system fields are not updated. For all record types that support groups, the change to the Owner field on the shared record is not tracked in the audit trail when the field is changed as a result of the user being deleted from the group, even if the Owner field is set up to be audited for the record type.

About Groups and Record Ownership Modes

Depending on the record ownership mode that you set up for a record type, records of that type might not have an owner. A record might instead have a primary custom book or might have no owner or primary custom book. For more information about record ownership modes, see About Record Ownership Modes. Record ownership modes apply only to record types that support books.

If you change the record ownership mode for a record type, then a record that previously had an owner might have the owner removed from the record when the record is updated for the first time after the ownership mode changes. In this case, if the former owner of the record is a member of a group, then all of the members of the group, except the former owner of the record, remain as members of the team. However, the Account record type is an exception to this rule. If the former owner of an account is a member of a group, then all of the members of the group are removed from the team.

NOTE: In the standard application, the former owner of the record is not retained as a member of the team, as described here. However, your administrator can configure the record type so that the former owner of the record is retained as a member of the team on the record. For information about configuring a record type to retain the former owner as a member of the team, see Customizing Previous Ownership for Shared Records.

Groups and Teams

Oracle CRM On Demand distinguishes between Groups and Teams:

• Groups are set up by the company administrator and apply to entire sets of records across the company. The Group feature must be enabled by Customer Care or by the company administrator when the company is set up for Oracle CRM On Demand.
• The record owners or company administrators set up teams. Teams apply to only those record types that allow teams, including:
  • Account
  • Accreditation
  • Activity
  • Application
  • Business Plan
  • Certification
  • Contact
  • Course
  • Custom Objects
  • Deal Registration
  • Event
  • Exam
  • Household
  • Lead
  • MDF Request
  • Objective
  • Opportunity
  • Order
  • Partner
  • Portfolio
  • Sample Request
  • Service Request
  • Special Pricing Request

    To set up a team to access the record, the owner must explicitly share that record using the Team section on the record Detail page. For activity records, the record owner adds users to the activity team in the Users related information section in the activity Detail page.

For information on setting up groups, see Setting Up Groups.

Related Topics

See the following topics for related information about groups and sharing calendars:

• Viewing the Calendars of Other Users
• Adding Custom Calendar Views