Common Group and Data Updates

So a lot can happen under the hood when an administrator takes what looks like a simple action, such as changing the role of a user. We chose this operation to illustrate all the possible types of sharing maintenance, but other common group and data updates can have a similar impact.

Moving a role to another branch in the hierarchy

One benefit to moving a whole role is that any portal accounts simply move along with their parent role, and Salesforce doesn’t have to change the related sharing. On the other hand, Salesforce must do all of the work involved in moving a single user for all users in the role being moved and for all of those users’ data.

Changing the owner of a portal account

The effort required for what looks like a simple data update—changing the name of the user in the Account Owner field—can be surprising. When the old and new owners are in different roles, Salesforce is not only moving the portal roles to a new parent role but also adjusting the sharing for all the data associated with the portal account.