Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Managing Business Units and Teams

The combination of business units and teams allows extreme flexibility in organizing your CRM implementation. At first it can be confusing: "Is marketing a business unit or a team?" However, this chapter provides you with a better understanding of how to use each organizational structure.

The essential difference between the two is that business units are hierarchal, potentially consisting of parent and children business units, while teams can cut across this hierarchy. As an example, let's assume that you have some standard business units: Sales, Marketing, Product Development, and Service. Let's also assume that you are starting development of a new product: X. You might create a team, Product X, that includes members from each of the business units. In this manner, teams offer you greater flexibility than you could get by simply having business units.

In this chapter, you see how to create and configure both business units and teams.

Managing Business Units

A business unit is analogous to a division or a profit center in a company. But the concept of business units in Microsoft CRM allows more flexibility than the simple concept of divisions in a company. Rather, business units are more like organizational charts. They also play a large role in the security model of Microsoft CRM.

For example, suppose a software dealership has three main business units: software, hardware/networking, and professional services. One or more of these units ...