Tracy van der Schyff

 #Office365Challenge This is the start around what you should consider with permissions, how to plan better and document your rules.

Related Posts / Resources:

Default permission levels in SharePoint

Understanding permission levels in SharePoint

How are Permission levels made up?

Now before we start looking at SharePoint groups, I think we need to discuss your strategy. Permissions get very messy because the overall rules are not discussed or considered.

According to Microsoft, an effective permissions strategy gains you control in three main areas:

Manageability and performance. The permissions settings you choose have long-term consequences for how much work it takes to manage your sites, and how speedily your sites respond to user commands.

Data governance. A planned permissions strategy can help you ensure compliance with your organization’s data governance policies, which may be unique to your company or an essential part of complying with financial and accounting disclosure and retention legislation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Cost of maintenance. A strategy that takes advantage of built-in efficiency tools, such as security groups, permission levels, and permissions inheritance will enhance ease of use for your site users, and minimize the requests for individual access that permissions managers have to respond to during the life of the site.

The rules around permissions should be directly linked to your business rules on how and when sites are built and for who. This of course forms part of your Governance planning.

If a department has their own site, do you then apply permissions for the whole department to access the site? What do you do with content that is shared across departments / teams? How do you manage people who move between departments. Who manages the permissions??

The more questions you can ask beforehand, and make notes of these, the better off you will be. Nothing needs to be perfect in the beginning. If you just start documenting the business rules as you understand them at that time (and keep on updating them as the environment or your thoughts around it changes), you’ll be ok. I promise.

Stick with me for a couple of days and let’s see if we can remove some of the headaches surrounding permissions.

Overview of my challenge: As an absolute lover of all things Microsoft, I’ve decided to undertake the challenge, of writing a blog every single day, for the next 365 days. Crazy, I know. And I’ll try my best, but if I cannot find something good to say about Office 365 and the Tools it includes for 365 days, I’m changing my profession. So let’s write this epic tale of “Around the Office in 365 Days”. My ode to Microsoft Office 365.

Keep in mind that these tips and tricks do not only apply to Office 365 – but where applicable, to the overall Microsoft Office Suite and SharePoint.