Public and Personal Groups

There are two types of groups.

• Public groups—Administrators and delegated administrators can create public groups. Use public groups to streamline sharing records with users in different parts of your company that aren't aligned with a single role. For example, you want to share the same opportunity records with Sales Reps in different regions, each of which is represented by a separate role. There are a few individual users who must also have access. Instead of creating separate sharing rules, you can create one public group with all of these roles and the individual user added that serves as the sharing rule target. You can use public groups in the following ways:
  • To set up default sharing access via a sharing rule
  • To manually share your records with other users
  • To give access to report and dashboard folders
  • To share list views
  • To add multiple users to a Salesforce CRM Content library
  • To assign users to specific actions in Salesforce Knowledge
• Personal groups—Each user can create groups for their personal use in manual shares, unlike public groups, which require setup from users with the appropriate permissions. For example, a user can create a personal group to share records with a subgroup of their team that's tasked with a specific project. Personal groups are available only in Salesforce Classic.

You can also include external Experience Cloud site users in your public groups. For example, you must share certain records with partner users that are all associated with different accounts. Create a public group and add all the needed partner users, then create a single sharing rule that targets this public group. You don't need to create multiple sharing rules targeting the role of the partner users in each account.

Tip Permission set groups consist of permission sets rather than users. Permission set groups bundle permission sets based on job functions or tasks. To learn more about permission set groups and why you use them, see Permission Set Groups.

• Public Group Considerations
  For organizations with a large number of users, consider these tips when creating public groups to optimize performance.
• Group Member Types
  Many types of groups are available for various internal and external users.
• Create and Edit Public Groups
  Create public groups to help configure your users’ access to records and other features. Only administrators and delegated administrators can create and edit public groups.
• View the Public Group Access Summary
  With the Public Group Access Summary, see the sharing rules, report and dashboard folders, and list views where this public group is used to grant access. You can also see the other public groups that it’s added to. The public group can be referenced in other features not listed in this summary.
• Manage Public Group Membership
  In public groups, you can assign and remove members such as users, other groups, roles, and portal roles. Where you manage public group membership depends on the type of updates that you’re making.
• View Group Lists
  View and edit information about a group and its members.
• Monitor Public Group Members with Reports
  See all users, roles, roles, territories, and other groups. Create a custom report type before building reports on public group members.
• Sharing Records with Manager Groups
  Share records up or down the management chain using sharing rules or manual sharing.
• Create and Edit Personal Groups
  Use personal groups to make it easier to manually share your records with other users. All users can create and edit their own personal groups in Salesforce Classic. Personal groups aren’t available in Lightning Experience.