“With great power comes great responsibility” but we can’t always guarantee all our users will be ‘responsible’ or be aware of the detrimental impacts their actions could have. As experts it is out duty to educate and also ‘clear the path’ for our users to the easiest and most risk free user experience.

Many things in Dynamics can be controlled with ‘Role Based Access Control’ for tables, forms, dashboards etc. but sometimes security at the ‘table’ (entity) level is not enough which is where things like field security profiles and ribbon customisations can be helpful. In the powerful wonder world of Dynamics Marketing, this is sometimes not a enough!

What is ‘Designer Feature Protection’?

With the help of ’Designer Feature Protection’ we are able to protect specific users or teams from certain aspects of the marketing content design features without stopping them from getting in and doing their job! At the moment is limited to restricting access for the Designer HTML tab and Litmus Inbox previews, but this feature has huge potential across the Dynamics Marketing app.

What does it look like?

I asked my good friend Kylie Minogue who keeps messing with the HTML and using up all out Litmus credits to try this one out with me. I set up a Designer Feature Protection record for Kylie to prevent her accessing HTML and Litmus. I could also restrict her entire team from accessing it too - but for now lets just pick on Kylie.

The result certainly made me smile - Kylie, not so much!

Looks great, how do I do it?

Assuming you have the power - to take away the power it’s just in the ‘Settings’ area of the Marketing App Under ‘Email Marketing’ - ‘Designer Feature Protection’

It’s great that this kind of access control can be given to Marketing Administrators without having to give them System Admin powers. It’s really easy to set up, understand and manage plus the flexibility of user or team is a huge bonus!

What other marketing feature do you think we should be able to restrict that cannot be controlled with security roles? I will certainly be adding items to my wishlist for the Microsoft Easter Bunny for this one.