MS CRM Entity Types & Ownership

The entities are used to model and manage business data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For example, entities such as account, campaign, and incident (case) can be used to track and support sales, marketing, and service activities. An entity has a set of attributes and each attribute represents a data item of a particular type.

The entities are divided into three categories:

1. System: System entities are used by Microsoft Dynamics to handle all internal processes, such as workflows and asynchronous jobs. You cannot delete or customize system entities.
2. Business: As a developer working with business data, you will use business; an account, contact, and letter are examples of business entities. Business entities can be customizable.
3. Custom:  After installation you can add custom entities to Microsoft Dynamics to address specific business needs of the organization.Custom entities also can be customizable.

What is Entity Ownership?

While creating the Entity in MS CRM you have to set the Entity Ownership and there are four types of ownership types available in MS CRM, let’s discuss one by one here:

1.       Organization Owned: Records of Organization Owner entities can be viewed by whole organization, this type of ownership entity records cannot be share or assigned. Organization entities have two access levels- None and Organization.

Article, Article Template, Currency and Web Resource are the type of Organization Entity.

2.       Business Owned: Entities that belong to business unit. Business unit, calendar, team, security role and user are the example of business entity.

3.       User or Team Owned: Assigned to a user or to a team. These entities contain the data that relates to customers, such as accounts or contacts. Security can be defined according to a business unit for the user or team. Because these records are owned by a user or team, they’re connected to a business unit and specific security roles for the business unit. Therefore, these entities participate in role-based security.

4.       None: These entities are not owned by another entity, most of aren’t visible in the solution explorer. These mostly consist of intersect entities created to support Many-to-Many relationships or where access to the record is controlled by a parent record. For example, Opportunity Product records must be accessed through a user or team owned Opportunity record.