of the
Someone recently asked me what I thought of someone adding 1,000 + business units to Dynamics 365. I told them it was a bad idea. Here’s why:
Business units are like large granite rocks–they are designed to be permanent and infrequently moved. While users can be moved between business units, it is not a trivial matter, especially if they own many records.
When you move a user from BU 1 to BU 2, the business unit association of every record that user owns changes. This can cause some surprises to other users who are members of the user’s original business unit if they have BU level read permission. The records owned by the moved user are now not available to them, but if they own child records of those records, like activities, it can cause some strange scenarios. Also, if the user owns many records, moving users between business units can be time-consuming.
Another potential impact from large quantities of business units is security role updates. Each role is not just one record–a copy of each role is added to each business unit. So if you create thousands of business units, making a small change to a security role can take hours.
My recommendation is to keep your business units to a minimum–only the minimal number to facilitate true BU security requirements. For more granular user segmentation, consider the use of teams. Teams are much more flexible, they can be used to control security access to records, and users can be members of multiple teams.
Hey,
That’s an interesting point but again this means that CRM is not made for huge companies such as Walmart with over 2’000’000 emplyoees or Volkswagen with over 600’000.
I wonder how perfomant Cloud or On-Premise solutions would be and how a suitable architecture would look like … :-).
Cheers
MrE
The question would be, do all 2m users that work at Walmart need CRM access via a user record?
CRM does have quirky auto-generated queries that are not the best, but overall it does pretty well…unless you go and do something silly 🙂
Even a WalMart size company could function without thousands of business units, especially since we have access teams and owner teams.
Hi,
I would like to know if it is possible to configure a subject tree by business unit.
If not, how can I resolve it?
Thanks,
Tatiane
Some of our tipsters have expressed passionate opinions about the subject tree (https://crmtipoftheday.com/641/die-subject-die/) while others have discussed strategies(https://crmtipoftheday.com/1011/case-subjectcategory-code-strategies/). The answer to your question is no–you cannot have different subject trees by business unit using the standard subject tree.
Recommendation is use categories or a custom case category lookup instead of subject tree. That way you can give each user business unit level visibility for the category entity, then make sure that the appropriate categories are owned by someone in the business unit.
Does this tip still apply today with modernized business units? Now if you move a user to another business unit, the data can stay with the owning business unit, and you can apply a security role from BU1 to a user in BU2.
I ask because teams level security isn’t cutting it for us. Team 1 only wants to see Cases that relate to their work (for practical and compliance reasons), so we give them user/team level access to the Case table. Trouble is, when a case is assigned to a user in that team, then the rest of the team cannot see it.
If we give them business unit level access to the case table then they get to see cases from across most of the organisation (because we only have one or two business units)… unless we make their team a business unit, but then we will end up with 100’s of business units across our organisation.
How do we get round this? Am I missing something? Is there a way to assign a case to a user, but leave the team as the record owner?
Hi Graham,
business units have come a long way since the early days. While some of the original issues were addressed, the performance considerations still apply though and 100s of BUs would still be frown upon. Without diving in details into your scenarion, it does look like you should consider access teams that are specifically designed to manage record visibility in these scenarios.
https://learn.microsoft.com/power-apps/developer/data-platform/use-access-teams-owner-teams-collaborate-share-information
HTH
George
Hi George,
And what are you thinking about creating a business unit for each account record (around 1 million) to manage account based access for around 5k users?
Do you see any impact on entire performance?
Gratings
Agnieszka
Hi Agnieszka,
whatever you do, do *NOT* create 1 million business units 😱, it’s a sure-fire way to bring your system to a halt. If you need to govern per-record access, access teams, especially auto-created access teams, are the way to go.
Thank you,
George