Chapter 3: Managing Security and Information Access

Overview

If you've deployed software systems in the past, you already know that you must design your CRM solution to appropriately restrict information based on individual user permissions. Controlling how your users access customer data is a mission-critical component of any business application. Microsoft designed the Microsoft CRM security model to support the following goals:

• Provide users with only the information they need to perform their jobs; do not show them data unrelated to their positions.

• Simplify security administration by creating security roles that define security privileges, and then assign users to one or more security roles.

• Support team-based and collaborative projects by enabling users to share records as necessary.

Microsoft CRM provides an extremely granular level of security throughout the application. By customizing the security settings, you can construct a security and information access solution that will most likely meet the needs of your organization. The process to customize the Microsoft CRM security settings requires you to configure your organization structure, decide which security roles your system users (employees) will have, and then define the security privileges associated with each security role.

Although you might not expect to, you will find yourself constantly tweaking and revising the security settings as your business evolves. Fortunately, the Microsoft CRM security model makes it easy for you to update and change your security settings on the fly.

More Info 

Although the security settings user interface appears similar to Microsoft CRM 1.2, Microsoft completely revamped the technical security structure in the Microsoft CRM 3.0 database to eliminate the use of security descriptors. Because of this, you can change and modify your security settings without the performance issues that some Microsoft CRM 1.2 users experienced if their system contained a large number of records.

In this chapter, we'll review the following security topics:

• Mapping your needs

• Security concepts

• Users and licenses

• Security roles and business units

• Sharing records