CRM 2013 – Why are access teams marooned?

No Access Team should be an island – Hosk

What are Access Teams

If you have never used access teams, never heard of them here is a quick description

Access teams and access team templates are new functionality added in CRM 2013, where you can share permissions to records to users/teams on an individual record basis.  You create a subgrid on an entity, which allows you to add users to the subgrid and shares the record with them.

Access Teams and Access team templates are a method to share permissions and records, which is easier to manage, quicker to add/remove users/teams because Access team templates will applying a standard set of privileges (read, write, delete, append, append to) rather than having to set this up for each individual user/team.

I wrote a blog post to get started with access teams and access team templates below

CRM 2013 – MB2-703 – Access Teams and Access Team Templates how to use them and key facts

You maybe wondering why should I use them, if so read this great blog post from CRM MVP Adam Vero

Why Use Access Teams in Dynamics CRM 2013

This is also an interesting article

Design and scalability considerations when using Access Teams in Dynamics CRM 2013

Microsoft Access Team Whitepaper

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=41190

Access Teams sound great, Why are they Marooned?

When answering CRM Forum questions I keep an eye out for CRM MVP’s posting answers because it’s a great way to learn best practices and read about problems (and their solutions) which I might run into in the future.  Adam Vero answers on security related questions are very detailed and interesting.   To get an idea of his knowledge read this blog post on Security Roles and Teams in CRM 2011 – An Inconvenient Half-Truth

The forum post in question is here

Deploy Access Team as part of CRM Solution

The problem

You are using access teams and field level security profiles, you have crafted them perfectly in your DEV environment and now it’s time to add them to your solution and move them to your test/production environment.

 

oh

 

That’s right, you cannot add the access team security profiles anywhere.  I have highlighted Field Security Profiles because this offers the kind of functionality which would be great for Access Team templates to sit alongside the other various templates (Article, Contract, Email, Mail Merge, Field Level Security)

 

 

Detailed explanation of the problem?

 

Access Team functionality is split into two sections

• Ticking Access Team functionality on the Entity
• Creating an Team template to apply to the Access Team on the entity

Here is a sample of an Access Team Template for the opportunity entity

The problem is, there is no way to add the access team template, so if you used access teams to share information, you would have to manually create each access team template on each CRM environment (and remember to manually change them all when they change).

If you have a lot of access team templates it’s going to take you a while to set them all up, manually setting them up increases the chances of a manual errors

Workarounds

I know what you are thinking, there must be a workaround, a tool, some kind of magic spell.

It’s possible someone could build a console app to import the access team templates but as yet no one has created it.

 

Why is the functionality left this way?

Great question and only Microsoft can answer why they create useful functionality and then give users no way to add access team templates to solutions.

I have looked on the internet but I can’t find any explanation for it.

Logically I can’t see why adding access team templates to solutions in the same manner as the other templates should be a problem and it begs the question – why create access teams but not allow them to be added to solutions

When will it be fixed?

I haven’t read/seen anything to indicate this will be fixed any time soon, so for the moment we have to hope it will be fixed sooner rather than later.

If you would like it fixed then give it a vote on connect

 

VOTE on connect

https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/1040938