Before creating or editing entities you should understand that there are different types of entities. Once a custom entity is created these types cannot be changed. The two major divisions are based on entity ownership and whether the entities are activity entities.
Entity ownership: There are four different types of entity ownership. When you create a custom entity the only options are user or team owned or organization-owned, but you should be aware that other entities have different ownership types.
| Ownership | Description |
| Business-owned | Entities that belong to a business unit. These entities have an attribute named owningbusinessunit. There are 12 business-owned system entities. These include Business Unit, Calendar, Team, Security Role, and User. |
| None | These entities are not owned by another entity. There are 127 system entities that don’t have an owner, but most of these aren’t visible in the solution explorer. These mostly consist of intersect entities created to support Many-to-Many relationships or where access to the record is controlled by a parent record. For example, Opportunity Product records must be accessed through a user or team owned Opportunity record. |
| Organization-owned | Contains data involving something that belongs to or that can be viewed by the whole organization. Organization-owned entities cannot be assigned or shared. For example, products are owned by the organization. These entities have an attribute named organizationid. There are 68 organization-owned system entities.These include Article, Article Template, Competitor, Currency, and Web Resource. |
| User or Team Owned | Assigned to a user or to a team. These entities contain data that relates to customers, such as accounts or contacts. Security can be defined according to the business unit for the user or team. These entities have attributes named owningteam and owninguser. There are 59 user or team owned system entities. Because these records are owned by a user or team, they’re connected to a business unit and specific security roles for the business unit. Therefore, these entities participate in role-based security. |
The custom entities that you create, and most customizable system entities, are either organization-owned or user or team owned.
Note: After an entity is created, you can’t change ownership. Before you create an entity, make sure that you choose the correct type of ownership. If you later determine that your custom entity must be of a different type, you have to delete it and create a new one.
