DYNAMICS 365 HIERARCHICAL SECURITY

The major difference between Manager and position is business unit. Manager hierarchy deals when you are in same business unit, where position hierarchy deals with different business units.

Dynamics 365 security consists of several layers. These include:

• Business Units
• Security Roles
• Sharing
• Teams

Hierarchical security offers an additional security layer.

There are 2 types of hierarchical security:

• Manager hierarchy. In this case, the manager must be in the same business unit or parent business unit of a report to see the report’s data. You may want to use this if you restrict data access between business units.
• Positional hierarchy. This allows you to access data across different business units.

We will go through setting up hierarchical security. Go go Settings->Security and select Hierarchical security:

You will see the screen below:

Select Enable Hierarchy Modeling and you will see the two options enabled:

Note the hierarchy depth is set to 3.

We can click on Configure to select users to set up as hierarchical by assigning users managers.

Consider a scenario where you had an organization such as below, with fictional users in our system:

• Sales Director (Amy Alberts)
  • Sales Manager (Alicia Thomber)
    • Salesperson (Alan Steiner)

Assign each user a manager:

Users are now showing as hierarchical:

Now assume all these users are assigned the same Salesperson role, which allows them to only see their own Opportunity records:

Prior to updating the system to use hierarchy security, let’s say Alan creates a new Opportunity. Alan can see this in his view:

And he sees Open Opportunities as only his:

Let’s say Alicia creates a new Opportunity. Alicia can see this opportunity in her view:

And the open opportunities view is restricted to what she is owner of:

Now, when we enable hierarchical security, Alicia will see Alan’s opportunities as well as hers. Alicia can also update Alan’s opportunities:

Amy will be able to see Alicia and Alan’s opportunities as well. However Alan’s opportunities are read only.

For positional hierarchy, set to Custom Position Hierarchy below:

And click Configure. The positions window will open:

Enter each position until you get to a positional hierarchy:

Now, ensure each user is set up with the correct positions:

This will produce the same results as above. The difference between positional and manager hierarchies is positional provides access across business units.