If there is one thing and seems to scare many users in
SharePoint land I would have to say it is permissions. For some reason this
topic is cloaked behind a thick fog of confusion and mystery. We are going to
dedicate the next few blogs to demystifying SharePoint permissions and shining
the light on its pros and cons.
Let’s get started by talking
about how SharePoint is structured. To help illustrate this concept let’s use
the metaphor of a university campus. Universities are big places with many
buildings and lots of things to do. Each building on university campus serves a
specific purpose, there are buildings dedicated to science, math, law, music,
etc… buildings can be large or small,
old or new. In each of these buildings contain classrooms, offices, libraries,
and labs, all focused around gathering and dispersing knowledge.
In the land of SharePoint we
have sites, usually dedicated to a single purpose, such as departmental
information or program information. In a site we have lists, libraries and
pages. All of these are designed to gather and share information. Using the
university as our parallel we can think of a site is a building and lists,
libraries and such are the rooms in the building. Everyone still with me?
So when we think about
SharePoint permissions we can continue the metaphor to include the students and
professors. If you were a student attending our happy university, you don’t
simply arrive on campus one day and randomly pick a building. No, you go
through a registration process. You request the type of classes you want or
have to take, what you plan to major in and so forth. Your requests are
processed and you are later presented with a series of classes you are
registered for and provided information about the time and location of the classes
you are “approved” to attend. You are not permitted to attend classes you are
not registered for regardless of your desire to take them.
Permissions work very much
the same way. You request (or someone requests on your behalf) access to
something in a site and an administrator of that site approves or rejects your
request. If approved you are given permissions, and you can only enter areas in
a site that you have permissions for.
I’m sure at least one of you
just though, “yeah, but I can see lots of sites but can’t get to parts of it,
what gives?” You can think about that like… a lab. In many cases you can walk
into a building at a university but when you try and open a door to a lab or
library you might find the door locked and only if you are given the key can
you get in. Permissions in SharePoint parallel this by being able to restrict
access parts of a site depending on the SharePoint Group you belong to.
Let’s take this idea a little
deeper. Let’s further stretch the metaphor and say you are law student. As a
law student you can check out books in the law library, or attend law focused
study groups. Only students that have declared “law” as their major can use the
law library or attend the study group. In the graphic below we can see that
thought in images. The student belongs to the group that is called Law Students
and Law Students has access to the Law Library.
This mirrors the function of
a SharePoint Group. By placing people that perform similar tasks into a group,
permissions can be given to the group. While you can add a person directly to a
site, list or library, adding them to a group will automatically provide them
benefits of being in that group.
Well, that was a whole lot of
info to take in, so let’s make this our stopping point for this week’s blog.
Check back next week and we’ll dive a little deeper into SharePoint
permissions.
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