Using Teams to Manage Account Access in Infor CRM SLX

Teams are a way of managing ownership of and access to Accounts in Infor CRM SLX. Teams can make managing access to Accounts much easier, especially when working with a large number of users. In Infor CRM SLX, an Account is only allowed to have a single Owner. But by creating a Team, and making that Team the Owner of the Account, you can give multiple Users access through the Team. This is beneficial in that it is easier to manage Team membership compared to changing the Owner of an Account. Since an Account must have an Owner, it has the additional advantage that it is not necessary to immediately choose a new Owner if a User vacates their position. That user is simply removed from the team.

There are multiple places from which it is possible to manage Teams. This is made more complicated by the fact that the LAN and web clients treat teams slightly differently. For this post, I will be looking at managing teams from the Team nav link under Administration at far left of the web client. Clicking that link will bring up the list of Teams. Clicking on single Team will take you to the details view for that Team, which is where you can manage rights and membership.

The top half of the screen has some basic info about the Team, plus a dropdown for the default Security Profile, which is the Security Profile new Users will have when they are first added. At the bottom is the list of all the Users on the Team. Clicking on a User’s Security Profile will bring up a pop-up window that allows you to change it. There are also links to the upper right of the user list that allow you add or remove Users or Teams. There is a checkbox that will cause a User’s manager to be added as well when a User is added. Keep in mind that this does not work in reverse, and the manager is not automatically removed should later be removed from the team.
As you can see, it is possible to add Teams to other Teams. This can be a very effective way to manage things. However, there can be unexpected results if you nest Teams more than two deep, so I would you avoid this unless you have a specific need to do so. Also, note that if a user has access to an account in multiple ways, the end result in the web client will be that used having the greatest granted access.

I also want to mention Departments, which are a specialized sort of team. Departments can contain only Users, not other Departments or Teams. Departments can be added to Teams, but cannot themselves own Accounts. New Departments cannot be created, you may only use the ones that exist. For an example of how Departments might be useful, if your service desk needs read-only access to all Accounts, you could add all those users to the Customer Service Department. Now add Customer Service to all Teams that own Accounts, giving it Read Only Default access to each Team. Every member of the Customer Service Department will now have read Access to all those Accounts (unless they are granted greater access elsewhere).