I’m often asked to solve permission errors in SharePoint. It’s not hard to do with the tools available in SharePoint, you don’t even have to know much about AD especially if you use SharePoint groups.
Ways to permission a SharePoint site:
- Permission directly against the user – not recommended as a lot of maintenance required when someone joins or leaves the organisation.
- Use SharePoint Groups – SharePoint groups allow you to manage users within the SharePoint interface, they can be reused all over the site collection
- Active Directory Security Groups – AD groups might already exist on your domain, these can be used but be aware that SharePoint 2013 caches the membership of these groups for around 2 hours and when using Office 365, DirSync will need to run to replicate these groups in the cloud.
What can be permissioned in SharePoint?
- Sites – entire subsites
- Lists – individual lists and libraries such as a document library
- Folders – folders within a library
- Items – items within a list or library
SharePoint permissions flow down the site from the root of the site collection unless otherwise changed. If permissions are changed at any level, any items below it will inherit the changed permissions.
SharePoint has a very easy way to check permissions of an individual user, check out my video below on how to use it.
