About Users and Employees

Users represent individual humans (or, in the case of integration, virtual humans) who use the Siebel CRM system. A User is any valid user (person or automaton) that can use the system, and has a minimum requirement of a first and last name, Login Id, and a Responsibility. An Employee is a special class of user who additionally must have a Position and may also have other optional attributes, such as skills and certifications.

The distinction of Employees (having a Position) is the key difference–as already noted, sales-related data (sales accounts, opportunities, and contacts) are associated to Positions, and therefore only Employees (through their Positions) can own such data. Non-employee users, such as customers who are registered to use the system to log service requests or place sales orders, cannot own that type of data.

Note: A Siebel CRM Employee is not necessarily an employee of the organization. There are examples of non-employees who may be registered as Employees, such as temporary contractors or partners who need to be able to own sales-related data.

When creating a User record, consider the following:

Responsibilities (groups of views). Users require one or more Responsibilities. This determines which Views that user can even reach. It is important to understand that Responsibilities and Views dictate where the user can go. Responsibilities and Views do not fundamentally determine which data a user can see. For example, assume that a user, through his Position, can see Contact data for a particular customer. Unless the user also has access to a Contact view through a Responsibility, that user has no way to see that data, even though they are entitled to see it. For more information about responsibilities, see About Responsibilities.
Organizations. An Employee User may be associated with one or more Organizations. This allows the Employee to readily access in their own Organization, for example, account records in their geographic reason, while preventing them access to data outside that region. For more information about organizations, About Organizations.
Position. An Employee User may have one or more Positions. As with Organizations, Positions control visibility to individual records within the application, such as specific customer accounts, but at a more granular level. It should be noted that while an Employee may indeed have multiple Positions, a user can only actively use one at a time. For more information about positions, see About Positions.