Access teams are a handy new feature, a new type of team introduced by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. We’ve touched on this new feature before, but today let’s look at it in a little more detail.
Just like with the familiar owner teams, you use access teams to share business objects and collaborate with other CRM users across business units. But it is much easier and quicker to create and disband access teams, and you don’t need to know ahead of time how many teams you’ll need to create.
An access team has no security roles assigned to the team, and the team owns no records. Instead, records are shared with an access team, and the team is granted access rights to the records such as Read, Write, or Append. The privileges of access team members are defined by their individual security roles and by roles from the teams of which they are members. You can create an access team yourself, or let the system create it for you.
According to Microsoft’s CRM team blog, you’ll want to use access teams for the following situations:
- The teams are dynamically formed and dissolved, such as when clear criteria defining the teams (established territory, product, or volume) are not provided.
- The number of teams is not known at the design time of your Microsoft Dynamics CRM system.
- Team members require different access rights to the records. You can share a record with several access teams, each team having different access rights to the record.
- A record is shared with a unique set of users that do not own the record.
This feature gives users more depth of team access than existed in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, and will be quite useful when configuring security models.
