How to Get Rid of the Owner Field and Rely on Automatic Assignment Exclusively

If you want to rely on sales territories or assignment rules to provide access to accounts, opportunities, and leads, you have to get rid of the owner field somehow. That's because you can't automatically assign ownership of accounts, opportunities, and leads.

Whoever creates a record becomes its owner and ownership provides edit access to data, including the ability to assign others to the sales team and reassign ownership. Here's how to get rid of the field from the UI:

• By default, each work area displays a list of records owned by the user, called My Opportunities, My Accounts and so on. You can replace these default lists with your own lists displaying records in user territories.

• You can also remove the infolets summarizing owned records from the Sales Infolet page.

• You can hide the field itself in the UI by creating custom layouts in Application Composer.

If you're concerned about unauthorized access by owners, you can create a dummy user and assign ownership of all records to that dummy resource. Whatever solution you explore, you must keep in mind that the owner field assures that the creator of a record retains access to that record.