Part II – 4.Organization Wide Default Settings in Salesforce

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Organization-wide sharing defaults set the baseline access for your records. You can set the defaults separately for different objects.

  1. From Setup, enter Sharing Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Sharing Settings.
  2. Click Edit in the Organization-Wide Defaults area.
  3. For each object, select the default access you want to use.
  4. To disable automatic access using your hierarchies, deselect Grant Access Using Hierarchies for any custom object that does not have a default access of Controlled by Parent.

When you update organization-wide defaults, sharing recalculation applies the access changes to your records. If you have a lot of data, the update can take longer.

  • If you are increasing the default access, such as from Public Read Only to Public Read/Write, your changes take effect immediately. All users get access based on the updated default access. Sharing recalculation is then run asynchronously to ensure that all redundant access from manual or sharing rules are removed.
  • If you are decreasing the default access, such as from Public Read/Write to Public Read Only, your changes take effect after recalculation is run.

  • You’ll receive a notification email when the recalculation completes. Refresh the Sharing Settings page to see your changes. To view the update status, from Setup, enter View Setup Audit Trail in the Quick Find box, then select View Setup Audit Trail.

Limitations

The organization-wide sharing default setting can’t be changed for some objects:

  • Service contracts are always Private.
  • User provisioning requests are always Private.
  • The ability to view or edit a document, report, or dashboard is based on a user’s access to the folder in which it’s stored.
  • Users can only view the forecasts of other users who are placed below them in the role hierarchy, unless forecast sharing is enabled.
  • When a custom object is on the detail side of a master-detail relationship with a standard object, its organization-wide default is set to Controlled by Parent and it is not editable.
  • The organization-wide default settings can’t be changed from private to public for a custom object if Apex code uses the sharing entries associated with that object. For example, if Apex code retrieves the users and groups who have sharing access on a custom object Invoice__c (represented as Invoice__share in the code), you can’t change the object’s organization-wide sharing setting from private to public.

This training blog is very useful to learn about the use of OWD in salesforce.