System wide Sharing Rules: Vacation

Question

I am trying to redefine the security on my org. I have rebuild the profiles (down from 78 to about 12) and the roles now make a lot more sense.

One of my issues is that the sales support folks, who all look after one set of people in a role spur, may have to shadow another sales support person when they go one vacation.

I don't want to permanently share the accounts/opportunities from the sales support for role A to the sales support from role B but can anyone think of a way to programmatically give permissions from one role to another?

|_SSupport A
|___Role A
|
|_SSUpport B
|___Role B

In the above SSupport B goes on vacation and SSupport A needs to address issues on opportunities owned in Role B.

One of the issues that I have to deal with in the future is that the sales team members do not work well in Salesforce.

Answer 1

You can create a Vacation Sharing Rule (or multiples thereof). Here's generally how it would work:

(a) Create two public groups, one for the people to do the support, and one for the people going on vacation.

(b) Create a sharing rule that shares accounts/opportunities/cases/etc from the latter to the former. Note that you're not particularly interested in sharing by role, but you may need one group per role to keep things simple. You can have hundreds of sharing rules, so this shouldn't be too complex.

(c) Write a trigger to add users to the vacation group when they are flagged as away on vacation (perhaps by Freezing them or checking some checkbox on their user record), and removing users from the vacation group when they are later taken off vacation mode.

The trigger will perform its magic indirectly by updating the group membership. You don't have to worry about how to track the records that are flagged during vacation, changes in ownership, or any other crazy technique. It also avoids having to use Account Teams.