Using SugarCRM Teams and Roles – SugarCRM Tips and Tricks

Step 1: Create the Basic Roles

For the above mentioned example scenario, let us create two different roles one for Sales Team and one for Support Team. Let us call them Sales Role and Support Role.

SugarCRM Role Management is available only for admin and you can go and create two roles “Sales Role” and “Support Role”. The moment you create a Role, it will list all the modules and their access rights next to it. The first selection after each module is “Enable / Disable”. If you do not select anything by default the system enables all the modules.

For the Sales Role, enable all Sales and Activities modules and disable the rest of them and for the Support Role enable basic Accounts and Contacts module along with Support and Activities modules.

Step 2: Assign Users to Roles

For each role, you have access to the “Assign Users Sub Panel” from which you can add users to assign them to the required Role. Once you assign any users to a Role, the user sees only the modules that are enabled for that Role. 

Let us assign the Sales Managers and Sales Executives to the “Sales Role”, Support Manager and Support Executives to the “Support Role”.

From the moment you assign the roles to the corresponding users, they can see only the modules that are useful for them. Of Course, this is not the only reason why we need to set up Roles.

Now if any of the users create any new records they are visible for them and also to the other users.  At this moment, everyone sees others records and in general you do not want Sales Executives to show their colleagues all records.

The access to the system allows people to create and delete records in each module. Nevertheless, you need to control what each role can do and cannot do. Instead of giving each role all permissions, the next step in the process allows you to delegate action that can be taken by them accordingly.

The next set of selections after the enable / disable button is to set permissions for that role to “Edit (Create and Edit), Export, Delete, List and View.

Let us say for “Sales Role”, against the Accounts module if you choose “None” for Export and Delete, any user who has a Sales Role will not be able to export or delete any records from the Accounts module.  Similarly if you allow the role for “List” and View as “None”, the user will be able to see in the list view all the records but he cannot click on it and open the record to see full details.

We want visibility among sales folks restricted based on the geographical teams they belong to so we need to first create 3 Teams North America Sales Team, APAC Sales Team and Europe Sales Team. Once you create the sales team, assign the corresponding team users to the teams.

Once you assign users to the teams, the accounts and contacts module show the users only the accounts and teams created or owned by their own team members and not other geography teams. Also, there is one more step in between to ensure this visibility works smoothly.

Sometimes, I want some accounts and contacts to be available for other team members and sometimes I don’t want certain key accounts to be visible for any team member. So in such a case we have step 5 to be followed.

In order to ensure we can give visibility of records across the teams and to restrict visibility of records among the other team members, SugarCRM has provided the option of Global Team and Private Team. SugarCRM systems come with a team available already by name “Global”. The reason why it is named as “Global” is whatever record that is assigned to team “Global” will be visible to every active user if his role allows the module. So if you create a new account and assign it to the “Global” team, whoever has access to the Accounts module will see that record.

Exact opposite purpose is for Private Teams. Whenever a new user is created in the system, the system creates a new team with that user name. For example, if we create a user by name john, a new Private Team by name John Private Team will be created and by default each user is part of two teams by name Global and his own Private Team.

So the records that are assigned to the private team are visible only to him. This brings in a new concept of a user being part of multiple teams. Because the moment you create a new user, he is coming up as assigned to two teams called Global and his own private team.

If a new user has been created and we do not allocate it to any team, by default he will have a Global team and a private team by his name. Also, his default team will be set as “Global”. So whatever record he creates in the system gets assigned to him and gets the “Global” team associated with the record.

If we assign “APAC Sales Team” to a user, by default when he creates a new record it will still be global and visible to everyone. So we need to go to the user record and change the default team to “APAC Sales Team” so that all records get assigned to this team. If he wants to explicitly change this or also add more teams to a record he can do.

Every user can be part of a minimum two teams by the name Global and his own Private team and that can be added to as many teams as possible. Based on the teams added he gets visibility into the team records based on his role.

If we make the default team of APAC Sales Team members as “APAC Sales Team”, as and when they create new records they get assigned to that team and if the role says they can see “All” accounts, instead of showing all the records of Accounts, it shows only “All records of APAC Sales Team”.

Therefore, teams are used for sharing information whereas roles are used for restricting actions and viewing in SugarCRM.

We have done well with the Sales Team and now we have three teams and they are continually adding more Accounts and Contacts to the CRM. And each team is seeing their own team’s accounts and contacts. But the support team is still a small team and supports all the customers from across the teams.

Since Support Team also should have roles, we define Support Executive Role and Support Manager Role and define what all activities and visibility are available for them. As it is a separate team, we can create a “Support Team” and make all the user’s default team as “Support Team”.

Now the biggest challenge is the Support Team is supposed to support the customers that are created by the different sales teams. The Support Team may not be able to see the accounts and contacts of the customers since they are not on global records.