When u try to logon to the WebUI, sometimes it pops-up to ask you to select between several business roles. U know after you select ‘Marketing Professional’, you will find the Marketing related tags and workcenters in the left navigation bar to the left of the ‘Home’ page in your CRM WebUI. But, do you know why and how this could happen? If you know this part already, ignore this article.

Normally we control the navigation layout via a navi. layout profile. Search the keywords in customizing and set the layout based on your needs for different business scenarios.

But to connect this set or design or whatever with the logon user, we have different approachs.

For sure the first and direct approach is to assign the profile to the user. However, this is not how it works in CRM. As there are still lots of other configurations differenciate between users, therefore we use the Business Role as a combination of all these settings/configurations into one business role. Standard business roles with default values upon different sales/service/marketing scenarios are provided by SAP, but you could also create and configure your own based on a bunch of sub-items such as navi. layout profiles. This is more flexible and easier for us the maintain the relationship of basic configuration and business requirement.

Back to the topic I raised, now we know that we don’t simply use profile to make the settings. For the approaches, we now can imagine that direct connection between user and business role is somehow possible to illustrate the requirement in first paragraph. Yes, it’s right, in this approach, we normally could use SU3 to change and maintain the relationships.

But this is still not the opitimal approach.

In fact we use organization unit to combine these two kinds of objects (user/business role) together. In customizing you could also search this part via ‘business role’. Via the ‘assignment of organization unit’, you goto the ‘PPOMA_CRM’ transaction. In the organization unit maintanence screen, you could make this assignment after selecting one of the organization unit(normally one position), then you use the menu ‘Goto’ –> ‘Detailed …’ –> 'Detailed’..where you could set the assignment of the business roles. Details instructions could be found in the document in the customizing. You could also check that out.

As far as I could remember, there should also be a third approach, but I will talk about it today, maybe will update it later.

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