Dynamics CRM 2013 Default Sitemap Pane Based on User Role

In Dynamics CRM 2013, since there is no longer a ‘Workplace’ area in the sitemap by default, we’re now able to define the default pane for users based on their security role. When looking at a user’s personal options, the Default Pane is now set to <Default based on user role>. This can still be changed on a per-user basis, otherwise we can leave it as is and let their security roles decide which pane to show them by default.

How do we customize it? How do we define the default pane in our custom security roles, or even modify the existing security roles? Unfortunately, this functionality is not available to customizers just yet.

Microsoft have commented that yes, this feature is limited right now, and has not been exposed yet; but they have assured me that they are considering it for a future release. Until then, we just have to work with the default roles and default areas which magically work together somehow.

So we can’t customize it (yet), but let’s explore how the default roles work with the default areas for now anyway.

Below we can see a table of all the default security roles that ship with CRM. Beside each role we can see which area, if any, they display by default. I was surprised to see that Scheduler and Schedule Manager did not display the Service area.

This means that a user assigned the CSR Manager role, for example, will see the Service area by default when loading CRM.

When a user is assigned more than 1 role from different areas, CRM applies a ranking of each role to determine which area to display by default.

The actual ranking looks like this:

1. Vice President of Sales
2. Vice President of Marketing
3. Sales Manager
4. CSR Manager
5. Marketing Manager
6. Salesperson
7. Customer Service Representative
8. Marketing Professional

Basically the highest role you have determines which area you see.

For example if a user has the Sales Manager and Marketing Manager roles, they will see Sales by default, as Sales Manager is higher up the list. Even if the user is given Marketing Professional as well, they will still see Sales by default, as Sales Manager is still above both other roles.

One more thing to note, is that for now at least, the default areas are coded to the particular roles behind the scenes. So you can change the names of these existing roles, and they will still work with their respective area. However if you ‘copy’ one of these existing roles, or manually create custom roles, they will not work the same. Since a lot of CRM 2011 customers ‘copy’ roles instead of modifying the default roles, this may not function as expected for everyone.

If we are building a highly customized system with all custom security roles and areas, we can also consider modifying the default roles/areas to meet custom requirements if these are otherwise going to be unused. This will allow us to maintain the “hard-coded” default areas associated with the roles to better suit our needs.

Overall, this feature is pretty cool as it means we don’t have to go through and set the default pane manually for each user. Hopefully it’s opened up a bit more in a future release so we can customize this more easily ourselves.