How do you deal with users being fulfillers for one area, but requesters for another, especially with subsidiaries?

[Max Nowak]

Hi,

I'm a little lost on how to categorize users in a big company with multiple subsidiaries, where employees of said subsidiaries might provide services to the parent company and other subsidiaries, but might also use services other subsidiaries or the parent company provides.

For example, let's say there's the parent company ACME Corp, and the have subsidiaries for purchasing and IT, namely ACME Purchasing, and ACME IT Services.

Usually, I'd say external companies I provide services to are accounts, and their employees are contacts. But what are external companies I provide services to, in this case? Because ACME purchasing uses services of ACME IT Services, and vice versa, so there really is no "external companies I provide services to" in this case, it's multiple companies providing services to each other, and they're all under the umbrella of the parent company.

Now, I could say, okay, those are all internal users with snc_internal, after all, they all work for ACME Corp, just in different subsidiaries - but that also doesn't feel correct, what if someone in purchasing wants to open a case? They wouldn't be able to, since there are basically no contacts in the system, since everyone is snc_internal.

[Michael Jones -]

It would sound like you are describing a use-case that might best be fulfilled with the Contributor user concept or potentially the Partner Account concept. 

The Contributor user satisfies the need to allow a user to be both a fulfiller and a user of services for an account (raise cases for themselves or other users within the account), while the Partner Account lets users create and manage cases across multiple accounts.

Unfortunately there can be some challenges in getting this configured the way you want (give users the access you want without giving them something you don't) but the core concepts seem like what you are looking for. 

I hope this helps!

If this was helpful, or correct, please be kind and mark the answer appropriately.

Michael Jones - Proud member of the GlideFast Consulting Team!