I had a strange one today. My users were complaining that they couldn’t drill-down from a Dashboard to a Report. They were getting Insufficient Privileges errors.

I had never known this to be the case, since the drill-down always worked for me (as an Administrator).

The reports were of the type “Campaign with Member Status”, but weren’t actually using Member Status. When I recreated the report as type “Campaign”, it worked! However, I didn’t want to recreate all the reports, so I investigated further.

I discovered that the users were getting these options when Creating Reports:

On the other hand, as an Administrator, I was getting these options:

Campaign Members are are stored as separate objects within Salesforce.com, and can be linked to Campaigns, Leads and Contacts. They basically store a Status string (eg Attended) and a HasResponded flag (to measure the success of Campaigns).

Unfortunately, there are no permission settings for Campaign Member objects. So what was preventing them from appearing to my users?

I stumbled across a Salesforce blog article about Best Practices in Campaign Management: Tips & Tricks that referenced a Custom Link that gives a “hidden report”. It didn’t help me, but it reminded me of a similar link on Campaigns that give a list of members:

Well, that report didn’t run for those users, either! (I made heavy use of the Login as Another User functionality to test this, plus a spare account that I use for testing purposes.) It’s a very useful report, so I actually want them to be able to use it.

The Discovery

Well, I eventually discovered that the users had to have Read permission on the Lead object. We don’t use Leads, so I had never assigned permission. Merely giving them Read permission fixed the problem and they can now run all of those reports.

It wasn’t obvious, but the fact that Campaign Member objects contain a pointer to Leads probably explains it. If they aren’t allowed to know about Leads, they shouldn’t be able to view an object that mentions Leads (or something like that). Case closed.

The Bottom Line

• Many Campaign Reports require Read permission on Leads to enable access
• Don’t assume that users have access to functionality — Test it by using the Login as Another User functionality