Organization-Wide Defaults (OWDs) sharing settings are used to define the default sharing settings for an organization. For most objects, the sharing settings can be set to Private, Public Read Only, or Public Read/Write.
Organization-wide sharing default settings, often referred to in Salesforce CRM as OWDs, specify the default level of access to records and can be set separately for most of the objects in Salesforce, such as accounts, contacts, and activities.
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When setting up OWDs, you can set the access level for internal users using the Default Internal Access settings and set a different default access level for external users using the Default External Access settings.
As shown in the preceding diagram, along with the user's profile the OWD defines the baseline level of access to data records that users do not own. The diagram represents the visibility or data access that is increasing as the other features are incorporated to provide...