Scenario/Problem: You want to assign a user or a group permissions to a site or add a user to an existing group.
Solution:
To allow users to view a site to which they previously didn’t have
access, you can either add them to one of the SharePoint groups or add
them to the site directly, without adding them to a specific group. The
following sections explain how to perform these options.
Tip
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, always
adding users to SharePoint groups is recommended because doing so makes
the permissions easier to manage in the future.
Note
A site normally inherits permissions from its
parent site (unless the site is a root site and doesn’t have a parent).
Therefore, you might not be able to edit a site’s permissions unless
you break the site’s inheritance, using the Stop Inheriting Permissions
option in the Permission Tools ribbon in the site’s security page. You
might want to manage the security of the parent site and not the
current site, so you should make sure you want to break the inheritance.
Add or Remove Users in a SharePoint Group
To add a user to a security group in a site,
navigate to the site’s permission management page, as explained earlier
in this chapter. In the Permission Tools ribbon, click the Grant
Permissions button. The Grant Permissions dialog appears, allowing you
to select the user or group and to which SharePoint group that user or
group should be added (see Figure 1).
By default, when you click Grant Permissions, this dialog defaults to
adding the user or group to the Members group—with the Contribute
permission set. If you want to change that, click on the Show Options
link at the bottom of the dialog to see the drop-down menu of groups
and permission sets you can choose from instead as shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1. The Grant Permissions dialog allows you to add users to a site group.
On the Grant Permissions page use the Add
Users box to type the names of the people you want to add (separated
with semicolons—for example, John doe;Jane smith). For example, to add
a person as a visitor to the site, type that person’s user name in the
Users/Groups box and select the site’s visitors group from the
permissions level drop-down (refer to Figure 1). When you are finished selecting the users and the group to which they should belong, click the Share button.
The page showing the people in the group is updated to show the people you added (see Figure 2).
FIGURE 2 The user John Doe has been added to the Intranet Visitors group.
To remove people from the group, navigate to the page for that group and select the check boxes next to their
names. Open the Site Actions menu on the toolbar and then select Remove
Users from Group (see Figure 3).
FIGURE 3 Removing a user from a group.
Add Users’ Permissions Directly to or Remove Them from a Site
You might not want to add a user to a
SharePoint group in a site but instead might want to give a user a
specific set of permissions unrelated to a specific group. In this
case, navigate to the site’s security page and click the Grant
Permissions button in the Permission Tools ribbon. In the dialog that appears, select the users
and select what permissions they have on the site by choosing a
permission level instead of a group in the Share dialog .
You can either type the names of the people
you want to add in the Users/Groups box at the top or click the Address
Book icon to use a people search dialog to select the users. Then
select the permission levels you want the people to have on the site.
You can select more than one permission level; for example, if you
select Contribute and Approve, you allow the users you selected to add
list items and files to the site and approve documents that they or
other people have added. Remember that the higher permission always
wins, so the user or security group has all the permissions from all
the permission levels.
To remove users from a site, open the site’s permission management page , select the users in the page, and then click
the Remove User Permissions button in the Modify section of the ribbon.
This removes the users from the site, including any SharePoint groups
the users belonged to.
Change Permissions of Users or SharePoint Groups in a Site
To change the permissions that are allocated
to a user or group in a site, navigate to the site’s permission
management page, as explained earlier in this chapter. To change the
permission levels, select the users or groups that you want to change
and click the Edit User Permissions button in the Modify section of the
ribbon.
The Edit Permissions dialog that opens allows you to set what permissions those users or groups will have (see Figure 4). After you select them, click OK to set the permission levels.
FIGURE 4 Selecting the permissions users and/or groups should have.