Professional Documents
Culture Documents
REQUIRED EDITIONS
For most objects, organization-wide sharing settings can be set to Private, Public Read Only, or Public
Read/Write. In environments where the organization-wide sharing setting for an object is Private or
Public Read Only, an admin can grant users additional access to records by setting up a role hierarchy
or defining sharing rules. However, sharing rules can only be used to grant additional access—they
cannot be used to restrict access to records beyond what was originally specified with the organization-
wide sharing defaults.
IMPORTANT If your org uses a Customer Portal, before you enable contacts to access the portal, set
the organization-wide sharing defaults on accounts, contacts, contracts, assets, and cases to Private.
This ensures that by default your customers can view only their own data. You can still grant your
Salesforce users Public Read/Write access by creating sharing rules in which all internal users share
with all internal users.
By default, Salesforce uses hierarchies, like the role or territory hierarchy, to automatically grant access
of records to users above the record owner in the hierarchy.
Setting an object to Private makes those records visible only to record owners and those above them in
the role hierarchy. Use the Grant Access Using Hierarchies checkbox to disable access to records to
users above the record owner in the hierarchy for custom objects in Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited,
Performance, and Developer Edition. If you deselect this checkbox for a custom object, only the record
owner and users granted access by the organization-wide defaults receive access to the records.
SEE ALSO
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=security_sharing_owd_about.htm&type=5 1/3
4/24/2019 Organization-Wide Sharing Defaults
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=security_sharing_owd_about.htm&type=5 2/3
4/24/2019 Organization-Wide Sharing Defaults
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=security_sharing_owd_about.htm&type=5 3/3