Access Control and Business Environment Structure

As part of implementing an access control strategy for your application, you must define your company’s structure, outside partner relationships, and so on. You also define the types of data and objects that people need to access and work with to perform their job functions. How you define the structure of your business environment directly impacts how access control applies to your users.

This topic provides some background information about business environment structure. If your enterprise is large and complex, you can accurately reflect its structure as you set up your Siebel Business Applications. You can build multilevel hierarchies of organizations, divisions, and positions. You build a hierarchy by associating positions, for example, with other positions through parent-child relationships.

Defining your business environment structure involves setting up the elements shown in the following table.

Element	Parent-Child	Description
Divisions	Y	Subunits of your company’s (or partner company’s) organizations. Used to set default currencies. Not used to control visibility of data.
Organizations	Y	The major parts or entities that make up your company (or your partner companies). Used to control visibility of data. See About Organization Access Control.
Positions	Y	Control the data set (records) to which a user has access. See About Position Access Control.
Responsibilities	N	Control the views to which a user has access.
Employees	N	Individual users in your company and in partner companies who have access to your company’s data.

You can set up divisions, organizations, positions, responsibilities, and employees in any order. You can also associate these types of records with one another in a variety of ways. For example, to link a responsibility and an employee, you can associate the employee with the responsibility from the responsibility record, or you can associate the responsibility with the employee from the employee record.

Note: Because organizations are based on divisions, it is recommended that you create your hierarchy of divisions first, and then determine which of these divisions to designate as organizations.

Caution: Changing your company structure, such as positions and divisions, can cause Siebel Remote components (Transaction Router) to reevaluate access control for all objects related to the objects that have changed. This can result in diminished performance. For more information, see Siebel Remote and Replication Manager Administration Guide.