Purpose
The purpose of this article is to discuss the various concepts, terminologies, and models available in Outreach. This article applies mainly to Engage and Guide.
Intended Audience
- Outreach Admins
- Outreach Users
Roles
Outreach follows the Role Based Access Control model of governance.
What are Roles?
Role in Outreach helps define a hierarchy of users that is used in setting profile permissions to access records. Each role represents a node in a hierarchy and each node can have users. If a user is associated with a node that has child nodes with other users, it is possible to configure permissions (via profile) to allow a user in the upper node access records that are owned by the users associated with the nodes below. In this way, a role hierarchy potentially (depending on the profile setting) extends record ownership to the users higher in the hierarchy. Role hierarchies can be imported from an external CRM via sync.
One User can only have a single Role assigned to them; each Role can have multiple Users. Assigning Roles to Users is optional.
Note: In Outreach, Role and Role (In Governance) are used interchangeably. They are the same concepts.
Role Hierarchy
Roles inside Outreach can have a parent → child relationship; parents can have multiple children and the hierarchy can be multiple levels deep.
It is important to note that, Role Hierarchy does not equal (HR) Corporate Reporting Hierarchy.
For a more detailed discussion on Roles along with examples of how to create, modify and manage Roles, please read Outreach User Roles Overview.
Profiles
Profiles are a collection of permissions that apply to an individual User.
Note: In Outreach, Profile and Governance Profile are used interchangeably. They are the same concepts.
Permissions
Permissions are individual settings that grant or deny a User the ability to perform a specific Action on a specific Resource (Prospects, Accounts, Opportunities, Kaia, Sequences, Tasks, etc.). Permissions can be applied through Profiles assigned by Admins.
User vs. Role vs. Profile vs. Permissions vs. Resources
Putting all the concepts together, the following is the relationship diagram between Users, Roles, Role Hierarchy, Profiles and Permissions.
Further Reading
- You can read more about available permissions in Outreach Governance Profile Settings Overview.
- For a deep dive into Profile assignment, please see How To Assign Outreach Users a Governance Profiles.
- For more information about the default Profiles that are available in Outreach and how Admins can use them, please refer to Outreach Admin Access and the article on Default, Leadership & Admin Profiles.
Governance Models
Lastly, let’s look at the different models that are used for governance in Outreach.
Ownership Based
An Ownership Based Governance model is scoped on ‘who owns the resource being accessed?’. There are two scopes allowed for Record access.
All Records
Users with this configuration can see all records regardless of who owns them.
Owned Records
A Record is owned by a user if the ‘Owner’ field clearly denotes them as the owner in context of the Resource. For example, in the context of Record type Account, an ‘Owned Account’ is an Account in which the ‘Owner’ field is populated with the user. On the other hand, in the context of mailing, an ‘Owned mailing’ would be an email that was sent from a specific user.
Role Hierarchy Based
A user in Outreach can also gain access to a Resource due to their position in the Role Hierarchy or the relationship they share with other roles in the Role Hierarchy. There are two main models.
Direct Reports’ Records
In this model, a user can access all the Records that their direct reports (in the Role Hierarchy) have access to whether or not they own the Record themselves. Let’s look at an example:
If Direct reports’ records permission is enabled for a user that has Role A assigned to them, that user can access any Records that users in Roles A, B, C, D and E can access.
Peers’ Records
In this model, a user can access Records of all the users in the same Role + any Direct Reports’ Records. In that way, this model is a super set of the Direct Reports’ Records model.
Applying the Governance Models
Here’s an example of a typical Permission setting to choose the governance model:
Note: Not all models might be available for every setting, instead only the applicable models will be shown automatically.
Governance Example
To bring this all together, let’s look at an example of how roles can be used to allow an user access to records owned by their subordinates in a n-level deep hierarchy.
In this example, Alice is a lead of a team and manages the SMB East region that has 10 sales people in total in a multi-level reporting structure. Our goal is to let Alice have access to any record that anyone in her department can access.
To do this, we need to:
- Create two roles: SMB EAST LEAD and SMB EAST.
- Make SMB EAST a child of SMB EAST LEAD in the role hierarchy.
- Assign SMB EAST LEAD role to Alice and SMB EAST to her reports.
- Go to Alice’s profile settings and enable Owned and reports’ records for the specific record types that we want Alice to have access to.
Once the above is configured, Alice will be able to access her and her direct report’s records.
Governance Courses
If you want to learn more about Governance in Outreach, please feel free to check out our on-demand courses from Outreach University:
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