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Group Management

Group Management is an optional feature that gives your company the ability to set up teams of people who work together, allowing them to share a common set of information.

Setting up groups at your company allows users to do the following:

• Group members can access a merged calendar, showing the availability for all members in their group. This allows employees to determine the best time to schedule appointments and to notify employees (and contacts) of appointments.

  NOTE: Users must have the Share Calendar privilege assigned to their role to be able to access the merged group calendar. Users who have the Share Calendar privilege can also set up custom calendar views. For more information, see Viewing Others’ Calendars and Adding Custom Calendar Views.

• Group members can share ownership of the following record types automatically:
  • Activity
  • Account
  • Contact
  • Household
  • Opportunity
  • Portfolio

    The new records that any member in the group creates are jointly owned by all members in the group. For example, if an employee belongs to group XYZ, an account that employee creates appears in the account lists for all members in that group. On that account record, the employee's name appears in the Owner field, the group name appears in the Primary Group field (if the company administrator added this field to your layout), and all group members can update the record.

    By default, the current group's members have full access to group records that were created after the member joined the group. The details about appointment, task, and contact records that are marked Private cannot be read by other group members.

    NOTE: For this functionality to work, the Default Group Assignment option in the Company Profile page must be selected. The option must be selected before the groups are created. For more information, see Setting Up Groups.

This behavior applies to groups:

• Each user can belong to only one group.

  After a user is added to a group, his name no longer appears on the user list when selecting group members.

• If you select the group assignment option at your company:
  • Records that exist before a group is defined are not updated unless the Owner field is updated with a new owner belonging to a group.
  • When a user joins a group, the user gains access to the group's records. However, records owned by the new group member prior to the user joining the group are not automatically visible to the existing group members. If a user becomes the owner of records after the user is added to a group, the new records are visible to other group members.

    The following example illustrates group record ownership:

    • User 1 and User 2 belong to Group 1. User 3 does not belong to Group 1.
    • User 3 owns Account 31. User 1 and User 2 will not have access to Account 31.
    • User 3 is added to Group 1. User 1 and User 2 still will not have access to Account 31.
    • User 3 becomes owner of Account 32. User 1 and User 2 will have access to Account 32.
• If users are deleted from a group, they are removed from all shared records that the group owns. They retain access to their private records.

Groups versus Teams

The application distinguishes between Groups and Teams:

• Groups are set up by the company administrator and apply to entire sets of records across the company. The Group feature must be enabled by Customer Care or by the company administrator when the company is set up for Oracle CRM On Demand.
• The record owners or company administrators set up teams. Teams apply to only those record types that allow teams, including:
  • Account
  • Accreditation
  • Application
  • Business Plan
  • Certification
  • Contact
  • Course
  • Custom Objects
  • Deal Registration
  • Exam
  • Household
  • Lead
  • MDF Request
  • Objective
  • Opportunity
  • Partner
  • Portfolio
  • Service Request
  • Special Pricing Request

    To set up a team to access the record, the owner must explicitly share that record using the Team section on the record Detail page.

For information on setting up groups, see Setting Up Groups.

Related Topics

See the following topics for related information about groups and sharing calendars:

• Viewing Others’ Calendars
• Adding Custom Calendar Views