You can assign permissions to relationship types to limit the people who can create a relationship using the relationship type. You can set a relationship type to be limited to any of the following:
- Everyone - should be used by most relationship types. All users can create relationships using the type.
- System Administrator - should be used for special system relationship types such as “Duplicate of”
- Groups - should be used for important relationships such as Key Billing Contact. A special group should be set up for this purpose.
Note that you can also restrict access to create and edit relationships using folder access rights, although this is not recommended. In this case, if a user does not have add related contact access rights to the source folder for at least one of the contacts, the user cannot add a relationship, regardless of the permission setting.
For details about access rights, see Configuring Folder Security.
If the user does have add related contact access, but does not have permission for a particular type, the user cannot add a relationship of that type.
In a normal InterAction environment, all users should have the access rights to add, edit, and delete related contacts in the two public folders (Firm Contacts - People and Firm Contacts - Companies). If users do not have these access rights, they may experience unexpected behavior when working with relationships, as described in Why Should I Avoid Using Access Rights to Secure Relationships?
The ability to view relationships is controlled with read access rights – a user can only see a relationship if he or she has access to see both contacts in the relationship. The special “Knows” relationship used with the Who Knows Whom™ feature has an additional attribute that allows anonymous relationships. For details, see Allowing Users to Enter Anonymous Relationships.
Why Should I Avoid Using Access Rights to Secure Relationships?
Access rights should not be used to limit the creation of relationships. Limiting add related contact access rights will cause some unexpected behavior for the user.
For example, assume that Ed Roberts is creating a relationship between Jane Tarnoff and Telenorth. Ed doesn’t have add related contact access rights to the Firm Contacts - People folder, but he does have add related contact access rights to the Firm Contacts - Companies folder. Because he does have add related contact access to the companies folder, Ed can create the relationship.
However, if Ed tried to create a relationship between Jane Tarnoff and another person sourced in the Firm Contacts - People folder, he would not be allowed to create the relationship because he doesn’t have add related contact access rights to either contact.
Because all contacts should be sourced in either the Firm Contacts - People or Firm Contacts - Companies folders and linked into other folders in InterAction and because related contact access rights are set on the source folder for a contact, you should never turn off related contact access rights for contacts. Essentially, you would be turning off related contact access rights for a large portion of the contacts in your database.
The recommended way to provide security for relationships is to use permissions. Permissions limit who can create relationships of particular types. By doing this, you avoid many issues of relationships being improperly or incorrectly created.