Roles
The Microsoft CRM SDK ships with a set of eight predefined roles that reflect common user roles with access levels defined to match the security best-practice goal of providing access to the minimum amount of business data required for the job. With these roles you can quickly deploy a Microsoft CRM system without the overhead of defining your own roles. However, you can create custom roles using the predefined roles as a template, or you can start from scratch to define an entirely new set of roles.
The following table lists the predefined roles included in the SDK.
| Role | Description |
| CEO-Business Manager | A user who manages the organization at the corporate business level. |
| Vice President of Sales | A user who manages a business unit at the child business unit level. |
| Sales Manager | A user who manages sales activities at the business unit or team level. |
| Salesperson | A salesperson at any level. |
| Customer Service Representative | A customer service representative (CSR) at any level. |
| CSR Manager | A user who manages customer service activities at the local or team level. |
| Marketing Professional | A user engaged in marketing activities at any level. |
| System Administrator | A user who defines and implements the process at any level. This role has the full set of privileges. Limit the number of people who are assigned this role. Do not delete or modify the System Administrator role because you will not be able to reinstate it and could therefore lock yourself out of the system. |
Each of the defined roles is associated with a set of privileges that determines the user’s access to information within the company. For example, the Salesperson role might contain privileges like prvReadAccount with Basic depth and prvWriteAccount with Basic depth, whereas, the Sales Manager role might contain privileges like prvReadAccount with Local depth or prvAssignContact with Local depth.
For a complete list of the privileges defined for these roles, see Appendix A.
A user can be assigned zero, one, or many roles. A user can simultaneously have any number of roles. For example, a user can have the Sales Manager role in addition to being a Customer Service Representative, in which case that user gets all the privileges of both roles.
Roles are configurable within Microsoft CRM and may be modified or even removed as necessary to fit your business needs. (However, the System Administrator role should never be deleted.) The roles you create for your business unit are inherited by all of the business units in the hierarchy.
Privileges cannot be modified at the user level, but they can be modified at the role level. For example, John is given a Salesperson role, which requires him to accept all leads assigned to him. However, the administrator wants John to be able to reassign leads assigned to him. As a result, the administrator either needs to modify the Salesperson role to allow this or create a new role that incorporates this specific privilege and add John to this role. Creating a new role is the recommended option unless you think it essential that all users who are assigned the Salesperson role now have this additional privilege.