Introduction to record ownership, profiles, and sharing

Before looking at the features available to manage users, we start with a brief introduction to the concepts of record owner, profiles, and sharing in Salesforce CRM.

Record owner

The terminology record owner is reflected throughout Salesforce and for each and every data record there can be one, and only one, record owner.

Only users that are active in Salesforce can have records assigned to them.

When a user is marked inactive in Salesforce CRM, he/she no longer has access to the application. However, any records that this inactive user owns remain in the application and continue to show the inactive user as the record owner.

The record owner setting generally determines if access to that record is available to other users within the organization, and is enabled using either profile or sharing settings.

Profiles and sharing

Profiles, sharing, and the optional role hierarchy setting work together and should be considered as a whole when...