Customer Engagement: Column Level Security

The security of information relating to the business activities of any organisation is vital to ensure that only people who are authorised, or indeed, have a requirement to view that information as part of their job, are able to see it and then there’s additional considerations around who might be able to then update or delete that information. Often there is a team or individual that “owns” particular sets of information.

Column Level Security in Dynamics 365 allows you to manage permissions down at the column level to restrict access to sensitive data or restricted data e.g., a Customer’s Credit Limit or Bank details. Once a column has been indicated as “secured”, only System Administrators can view/edit that column until permissions to it are granted using Column Security Profiles to which users/teams can be added. Permissions can be set for Create, Read and Update on the column.

Different Column Security Profiles can be created to grant different levels of access. If a user does not belong to any of the profiles (or is associated via team membership) then they will be blocked from reading the field.

Let’s follow this through based on our Credit Limit field on Account and a user called Bill White.

Once “Credit Limit” is secured, when Bill goes and looks at the record (provided he is not system admin) he will just see asterisks blocking out the data. The padlock symbol next to the form field simply indicates that it has column level security applied.

Now, let’s say a new Column Security Profile was created for read-only access to the Credit Limit fields (and potentially other fields on Account)

When Bill then looks at the Account record, he can view the credit limit but is unable to alter it.

Now, a new Column Security profile with full access to the secured account fields is created and Bill is added to that security profile

When Bill now looks at the Account record, he can view and edit the credit limit.