Recently, we have started seeing customers using custom security roles more and more.  For anyone that has tried building a role from scratch, they quickly find that they run into a lot of permission issues because the permissions needed for a certain task is not documented very well.  In fact, the only real way of troubleshooting permission related issues is to have access to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM server and capture a server side platform trace.  This is great for our OnPremise customers but that’s not possible for our Online customers. 

Our intention is to post the minimum required permissions to accomplish common tasks within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.  As of now, the one topic that we have seen come up within quite a few cases is a request for the minimum required permissions to configure the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client.  This post will cover those requirements.  Know, this article simply allows a user to configure the CRM Outlook addin and that user will have VERY LIMITED options within the CRM toolbar.  If you need additional information about what permission you need to synchronize the CRM Outlook addin to Outlook, then I recommend reviewing the following article that discusses what the various permissions are responsible for:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh547441.aspx

So what are the minimum permissions required in order to get the Outlook client configured and have the toolbar show up within Outlook.  The way I’m going to approach this is to go through each tab of the Security Role and list the minimum required permissions:

Core Records

There are two “entities” that are required within the Core Records tab. Both of these entities require User level for the Read permissions.  These are:
Saved View
User Entity UI Settings

Business Management

There are five “entities” required within the Business Management tab.  These require an array of permissions for Read access:

Organization: Organization level
Team: Business Unit level
User: Business Unit level
User Settings: User level

Under Miscellaneous Privileges:

CRM Address Book: Organization

These should be all of the required permissions to simply configure the Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook client. If you have any questions, let me know.