Organization Wide Default (OWD) Sharing Settings in Salesforce

In this blog, we will be discussing OWD. So, let's take a look at what OWD stands for, as we know that OWD stands for Organization-Wide Default. These are the baseline settings in Salesforce. They specify which records can be accessed by which user and in which mode.

Some of the specifications of OWD are:

These settings can be overridden using the sharing rules.
Only one user can exist in one profile.
Only a single role can be assigned to a specific user.

Salesforce Security

Object Level Access	Profiles
Permission Set

Profiles and Permission Sets give the desired level of access to the object

Record Level Access	Organization-Wide Default
Role Hierarchy
Sharing Rules

Record Level Access in Salesforce can be done by OWD, Role Hierarchy and Sharing rules.

Don't forget to check out: Manual & Apex Managed Sharing in Salesforce

Points to be Noted in OWD:

Profiles provide baseline access.
Nothing can be granted more access than profiles.
Organization-Wide Defaults are the most restrictive settings in SFDC.
Role Hierarchy and sharing rules are used to give access to records we do not own.

OWD settings provide the most restrictive settings which can be opened up by role hierarchy and these role hierarchies are to be opened up by sharing rules.

And all these factors are responsible for record-level visibility in Salesforce.

Now moving to permission sets, there are four permissions in sharing rule which are as follows:

Private
Public Read
Read/Write
Read/Write & Transfer

Let’s discuss them in brief:

Private – In private the owner can only access.
Public Read – In public read every user can read and edit the data.
Read/write - In read/write similar to public read every user can read and edit the data.
Read/Write and Transfer – A user can read, write and transfer. Here transfer refers to transfer permissions and changes the ownership.