Field Service Lightning comes with some powerful and quick-to-configure tools to accelerate the process of providing visibility to the right records.
For Field Technicians, the best practice is to lock down the visibility and then the platform will generally make a Service Appointment and it’s related/parent objects visible at the point of dispatch.
Dispatchers are assigned to territories in the “quick start” functionality available in the settings. This creates “User Territory” records for them which are used in tandem with Public Groups to enable visibility of everything within the territories.
But what about when the consultant needs to grant territory-wide access to Service Technicians? Let’s have a look at a few different scenarios:
Technicians View Everything in One Territory
If the technician needs to see everything in a territory, a User Territory can be created which provides access.
This needs to be manually managed though - so the administrator should be left with a process of adding/removing User Territories.
Technicians View Everything in Multiple Territories
In this example, let’s break up our territories into the following model:
Midwest Territory
> Illinois
> Chicago North
> Chicago South
> Chicago West
> Chicago Downtown
> Missouri
> Wisconsin
> Minnesota
> Michigan
> Ohio
A structure of parent territories, such as “Illinois” can be created to enable hierarchical access.
The User Territory record should be created for either the Illinois Territory (to access all 4 Chicago territories), or individually (to specify which territories are available).
Giving the user access to “Midwest” would give deep access to all the states within that territory, but also to all the child territories such as our 4 Chicago areas that we covered above.
User Territories for Service Technicians Inexplicably Not Working?
There is a difficult-to-find limitation of User Territories, which here at Brick Lane we spent many hours trying to find the reason for.
When you set up Service Territories, the sharing settings across the Field Service objects should always be set to private.
If the Service Territories are set up when a public sharing model in place, User Territories will not work in the same way for those territories. The only workaround unfortunately is to recreate those territories with a private sharing model in place.
If that’s not an option - and it may prove difficult to do this in a live FSL setup - then you may need to consider using the core Salesforce sharing tools available as a workaround. But bear in mind this will be difficult at volume so consultants should recommend short term pain for long term gain.