Owner-Based Sharing Rules

Chapter 8 of Securing Salesforce: Sharing and Visibility, Part 2: The File Cabinets: Sharing Records. New to the course? Start with chapter 1.

Chapter 7 shared records by what’s on them. This chapter shares them by who owns them. A criteria-based rule is studying the record. An owner-based rule is studying the owner: nothing on the record decides it, not the region, not the type, not the status. Only who owns it.

Put a public group in the source, and an owner-based rule becomes an enormously powerful vacuum cleaner. It picks up every record owned by anyone in the group, and by anyone in the roles and groups inside it, and shares them with another set of people. One rule can do a lot. And because it follows people, it moves every time people move.

The ideas in this chapter

The source is the owner. The rule picks up every record owned by a set of people: a group, a role, a role and its subordinates, a territory or a queue.
Groups on both sides. The source and the target are both final once saved, so put groups there and change the groups instead.
The level is the most a rule gives, not the most a user gets. The target still needs the object permissions to match.
Go downward, or not. The hierarchy always carries access up; subordinates carry it down only if you choose them.
One rule can open another object, up to the account from its children, and down from an account to its contacts, opportunities and cases.
Follow the owner, or follow the record. A person or team means owner-based; a value on the record means criteria-based.
Every move is a recalculation. Transfers, role moves and group changes rewrite the rows for everything those people own.
Plan a reorganization like a sharing change, with big owners out of source groups.

The picture

Here’s where the chapter starts: the vacuum cleaner.

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And the choice every sharing rule starts with: the owner, or the record.

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The path through this chapter

Four modules, each standing on its own.

Owner-Based Sharing Rules: Sharing by Who Owns the Record. The source is the owner; the vacuum cleaner; five steps to build one; the level and the profile behind it; what Salesforce watches; four things that surprise people; the choices that are final.
Source and Target: Choosing Whose Records and Who Gets Them. The categories; go downward, or not; one rule or several; the same bucket on both sides; what else the rule reaches.
Owner-Based or Criteria-Based? Choosing the Sharing Rule. Follow the owner or the record; what each one follows on a transfer; who can change the input; the 50 inside the 300; don’t fake one with the other; when the answer is both.
When People Move: Owner-Based Rules, Reorganizations and Recalculation. What changes the shares; moving one user; moving a whole role; big owners in a source group; locks; habits for big changes.

Then check what stuck with the study guide.

What an architect decides here

For each owner-based rule, its source, target and level, with groups on both sides wherever you can, and the reason in the description.
For each role in a target, whether access goes downward to its subordinates, and who above it gets the records through the hierarchy.
For account rules, the access to contacts, opportunities and cases, each set on purpose.
For each sharing requirement, whether access should follow the owner or the record, and what a transfer should do.
Who can change each rule’s input: who transfers records and changes roles and groups.
Which roles and groups are sources, so every reorganization starts with that list, and that big owners stay out of them.
How reorganizations run: rehearsed, bottom up, off-peak, with retries, and deferred calculations for the biggest.

Beyond the exam: what AI changes. Agents create records, transfer them and will be asked to reorganize. If every record an agent creates is owned by one agent user, an owner-based rule on that user shares all of them at once. An agent that reassigns cases moves access with every transfer. And “move these 40 reps to the new region” is 40 field updates to the agent, and every record those reps own to the sharing model. Decide who owns what agents create, and ask what a change will move before an agent makes it. Chapter 20 covers agents.

Explore

Each module lists its own sources. Two to start with:

Create Owner-Based Sharing Rules (opens in a new tab), Salesforce Help (checked 2026-11-07)
Group Membership Operations and Sharing Recalculation (opens in a new tab), Designing Record Access for Enterprise Scale, Salesforce Developers, Winter ‘27 edition (checked 2026-11-07)

Next: Config-Based Sharing: Manual Shares, Teams and Territories