Multi-tenant Email Sharing via Database Inheritance
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Solution Overview
Problem
Managing electronic communications, particularly sharing emails and email content, is challenging in multi-tenant database systems due to difficulties in relating emails to multiple people or objects and maintaining data separation among tenants.
Innovation Solution
A multi-tenant database system that allows emails to be stored as entities with relationships to other objects, enabling automatic or manual association with contacts, leads, opportunities, and accounts, and providing a sharing model that inherits sharing attributes from parent records, thus enhancing user information and access control.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If emails are stored as entities with relationships to multiple objects in a multi-tenant database system, then the ability to relate emails to multiple people or objects is improved, but the device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the email storage into separate tables: a messages table for email content and a message_members table for relationships. This segmentation allows the system to handle multiple object relationships without increasing overall system complexity, as each relationship is stored as a separate record linking the message to the relevant object.
Solution Approach 2:
The message_members table serves as a universal structure that can store relationships between messages and any type of object (contacts, leads, opportunities, accounts). This multi-functional design allows a single table structure to handle diverse relationship types without requiring separate specialized tables for each object type.
2Reliability
If a sharing model is implemented that inherits sharing attributes from parent records, then access control is improved, but the device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the sharing model with the existing multi-tenant database architecture by implementing inheritance at the database level. The sharing attributes are automatically inherited from parent records through database relationships, eliminating the need for separate complex access control mechanisms while maintaining reliable multi-tenant data isolation.
3Productivity
If automatic association of emails with contacts, leads, opportunities, and accounts is implemented, then productivity is improved, but the device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements self-service through automatic association of emails with relevant objects based on email content and metadata. The database automatically determines and creates relationships between messages and contacts, leads, opportunities, or accounts without requiring manual intervention, thereby improving productivity while the automated nature prevents complexity accumulation.
Data Source
AI summary
A method for sharing an email in a multi-tenant database system is provided. The method receives, at one or more computer systems associated with the multi-tenant database system, the email from a first user; determines, at the one or more computer systems, a database object associated with the email; maps, at the one or more computer systems, the email to the associated database object; and provides viewing access to the email to a second user with access rights to the database object.