Almost two years ago I wrote on the merits of using Teams vs Queues for managing Cases. While I stand behind what I wrote (Teams are simpler but Queues are more powerful) another element raised its head recently which is worthy of consideration if you are going down the path of setting up Case management.

Teams are a great, simple way of managing Cases. You set the ownership and set up some dashboards to view the Cases and you are away. However, unlike Queues, Teams have another important purpose in Dynamics: security. A common security pattern in Dynamics is to have separate Business Units, each with a ‘sharing Team’ so that Users in one Business Unit can hide their records from the other Business Units or allow specific individuals to see them via the sharing Team. I described this model in Tip 1067. So what happens when these two ideas collide?

For the most part using Teams for security and Case management still works ok. However, if you have a list showing “All Cases Owned By My Teams” make sure the list of Cases are the ones you expect. Similarly if you have a “All Cases Owned By User in My Teams”, make sure these are the Users you are expecting. In short, as you are using Teams as both a grouping for Cases and a grouping for Security, if the groupings are not aligned, there may be confusion and unexpected results.