CRM security privileges for appointment creation?

Posted by Mike Snyder on April 26, 2007  |  Comments (2)

Sometimes when you're adjusting Microsoft CRM security roles, you'll get an error message when trying to perform an action telling you that you don't have permission and you'll think to yourself..."what in the world are they talking about?!?!" After you review the security roles you wonder what privilege could I possibly be missing that would impact this?

As it turns out, this very scenario happened to me this morning as I was preparing for an important customer demo. I created a VERY streamlined security role that would just display Accounts, Contacts, Cases, Opportunities and a few custom entities. By removing all the other security privileges I knew that the prospect wouldn't get distracted by all of the other out-of-the-box entities such as Marketing Lists, Quotes, Orders, Invoices, and so on. I wanted a super streamlined user interface for my demo so I took off all the extra stuff.

However as I did a practice run, I noticed that I could NOT create a new Appointment. This was confusing because I was pretty sure I had the security roles setup correctly. The error message I received looked like this:

I decided to check the "Privileges by Message" documentation on MSDN to make sure I didn't miss anything. This website shows which security privileges you need to perform certain actions and many times the necessary privileges are not obvious! For example, I was looking at creating an Appointment and the MSDN website said I need these privileges:

• prvAppendActivity
• prvAppendToAccount
• prvAppendToActivity
• prvAppendToContact
• prvAppendToContract
• prvAppendToIncident
• prvAppendToInvoice
• prvAppendToLead
• prvAppendToOpportunity
• prvAppendToOrder
• prvAppendToQuote
• prvAppendToService
• prvCreateActivity
• prvReadActivity
• prvShareActivity

Some of these really jump out at me, for example who would have guessed that you need Append To Contract privileges just to create an Appointment?!!?

So after reviewing the MSDN website I double-checked all the privileges in my security role and everything matched up per the spec, but I was still getting the error message. After reading the text of the error message a little more closely, the light bulb finally went off. Under the Service Management tab, there is a miscellaneous privilege titled "Search Availabilty" and that seemed to match up with the error message. I toggled this privilege on for the security role and Voila! I was able to create an appointment.

While of course I was happy to have solved my problem for the demo, I still find it a little confusing that this Search Availability privilege (on the Service Management tab no less!) is required to create Appointments...especially since this privilege was not listed in the MSDN article.