Share Reassigned Records with Original Owner

There is a rather obscure system setting that gets overlooked in a vast majority of CRM implementations, it relates to sharing records with the original owner.

In the Settings --> Administration --> System Settings window, right on the General Tab. There is a section marked as "Set whether reassigned records are shared with the original owner". You can then choose whether or not to share reassigned records with the original owner.

What this does is any time you reassign a record it will share the record with the previous owner. Not just the original creator, but every owner after. So, this could be a great way for people outside of the sales department to follow up on leads that they have passed onto the sales team. See how deals they provided the company have panned out. Or cases created by the sales team can be viewed again to see how the customer support team handled a situation that a sales rep reported.

On the other hand, this could be a potential security nightmare for some companies where users should only see their own records. So, any time a sales person switches territories, or customer service reps who should only be servicing specific customers could potentially see more than is intended.

The good news is that fixing this is as simple as changing this option in the System Settings from "Yes" to "No". This will not undo anything that is already shared, but it will stop the system from sharing anything more if you don't want it to.

Knowing how data can be viewed helps when there is a "security breach" and suddenly people can see more than they are supposed to see.

David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.