Optimize the permission levels for users in Microsoft SharePoint

By | March 21, 2017

Microsoft SharePoint is well known as a collaborative software solution for the enterprises in handling business documents among the users across the organization. For this, it allows you to create a SharePoint site, which as a platform for the sharing of the content among the users. Here, at this point, it should be noted the there are various types of content which hold different kinds of privacy to access. For instance, you might want to provide access only to members of your team, or you might want to provide access to everyone, but restrict editing for some.

Accordingly, SharePoint allows you to determine the permission levels across the users. An easy way to do this is to use the default groups and permission levels provided accordingly. However, you may often need to set more specific permissions beyond the default levels.

Here, we present a brief overview about different default and user permission levels:

Default permission levels

Default permission levels allow you to quickly and easily provide common levels of permissions for one user or groups of users. A little details are as following:

•   Full Control– This is the highest level permission, which contains all available SharePoint permissions. By default, this is assigned to the owners group. It cannot be customized or deleted.

•   Design– This permission allows the users to create lists and document libraries, edit pages and apply themes, border and style sheets on the SharePoint site. There is no SharePoint group that is assigned this permission level automatically.

•   Edit- This permission level allows to add, edit, and delete lists; view, add, update, and delete list items and documents. By default, this is assigned to the Members group.

•   Contribute- With this permission level, users can View, add, update, and delete list items and documents.

•   Read– This allows to View pages and items in existing lists and document libraries and download documents.

•   Limited Access– This enables a user or group to browse to a site page or library to access only a specific content item. Here, they do not have permissions to open or edit any other items in the site or library.

•   Approve– This lets the users to edit and approve pages, list items, and documents. By default,    the Approvers group has this permission.

•   Manage Hierarchy– this helps the users to create sites and edit pages, list items, and documents. By default, this permission level is assigned to the Hierarchy Managers

•    Restricted Read– with this, users can view pages and documents, but not historical versions or user permissions.

•    View Only– users can view pages, items, and documents. Any document that has a server-side file handler can be viewed in the browser but not downloaded. However, the file types, such as video files, .pdf files, and .png files, can still be downloaded. These do not have a server-side file handler, and so cannot be opened in the browser.

User permissions

As provided by SharePoint 2013, there are 33 permissions to be configured in the default permission levels, except for the Limited Access and Full Control permission levels. Thus, you can also create a new permission level to contain specific permissions, such as, list permissions, site permissions, and personal permissions. They depend on the objects to which they can be applied, such as, Site permissions apply to a particular site, List permissions apply only to lists and libraries, and Personal permissions apply only to certain objects, such as personal views and private Web Parts.

To know more about how these permission levels can be configured according to the type of users, or contact our SharePoint expert, please click here.

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