Owner-based versus criteria-based sharing rules
Key Takeaway
Ask whether the business requirement is about record ownership or about record data: ownership points to an owner-based sharing rule, and field values point to a criteria-based sharing rule.
Sharing rules open up record access beyond the org-wide defaults for specific groups of users. There are two main types, owner-based sharing rules and criteria-based sharing rules, and the business requirement tells you which one to use.
What sharing rules do
Org-wide defaults set a baseline level of access. Sharing rules make automatic exceptions to that baseline for selected sets of users.
Sharing rules can only grant wider access, never restrict it below the org-wide default. You can create them only when the object's org-wide default is Public Read Only or Private.
Every sharing rule answers three questions:
- Which records should the rule share?
- Which users should the rule share them with?
- What access should the rule give? The access level is either Read-Only or Read/Write.