CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm setting up CiviCRM for a membership organization that will be using it for a variety of purposes, including membership recruitment.  Recruits have contact records that members of the organization update as the recruit moves through the recruitment process. 

Each recruit is assigned a multiple members who are responsible for his or her recruitment.  These members need the ability to edit the recruit's information from the frontend, after logging into their own Joomla account.  These members are recorded in custom fields of type "contact reference".  In addition to these members, there is a defined set of members who will need accesss to edit information for all recruits.

I'm struggling with how best to enable edit access to these recruit records for members who should have it.  I understand that if a relationship is established between the contacts and edit permissions are granted, then the scenario I described can work; however, this would require the establishment of thousands of individual relationships.

My questions are:

- Is there a way to create a relationship when a member is recorded in one of the custom "contact reference" fields in the recruit's profile?
- Is there a way to automatically create relationships between a recruit and a member or group of members based on tags or groups applied to the recruit's record?
- Is there a way to accomplish this that doesn't involve relationships at all?

Lastly, from the perspective of profiles - is there a way to make profiles available within the CiviCRM application, in addition to the frontend?

Thanks in advance for the help!