Criteria Based Sharing Comes to Salesforce with Spring ‘11

The Spring ‘11 release of Salesforce.com brought some pretty cool developer features. One of the most useful for me will be criteria based sharing. In the past, using sharing rules was limited to sharing based on who owned the record only. This often meant writing Apex managed sharing logic to control access to records based on factors other than ownership. Doing this worked, but it often lead to complex sharing models that were very difficult for admins that didn’t write code to troubleshoot or work with. It also caused extra Apex logic to execute which at times could cause issues with governor limits.

Using criteria based sharing, I can now accomplish many of the things I used to have to write Apex sharing logic for. For example, if I want to share an account with different groups, depending on the type of account it is, I can simply set up an org wide sharing rule using the account type as a criteria filter. This is far quicker, and easier than writing code, and unit tests to share the records.

For more information about criteria based sharing, or other Force.com enhancements from the Spring ‘11 release, check out the Force.com Spring ‘11 Site.