SharePoint permissions provide key functionality to your business, helping you define ‘who can see what’ when it comes to important, sensitive and valuable documents. As such, SharePoint permissions play a large role in the life of a SharePoint administrator or Site owner. Permissions aren’t limited to just documents, though. Permissions apply to any SharePoint ‘object’—which can represent a Site, List, Library, Folder or Item.
A SharePoint ‘object’ may seem vague, but that’s because there is a total of 33 different permissions that can be assigned to a user, made up of the following:
- Site Permissions (18)
- List Permissions (12)
- Personal Permissions (3)
That’s a lot of permissions for an administrator to get their head around, especially when you consider that each permission needs to be addressed differently. That’s why we published a comprehensive SharePoint Permissions Guide—so take a look if there’s anything you’re unsure of in the wide world of SharePoint permissions.
Such variety of SharePoint permissions allows for a great deal of flexibility and functionality when it comes to assigning them, from assigning a user editing capabilities over a single document to Full Control over a SharePoint site. But assigning them all takes a great deal of effort, and doing so manually can take a long time, especially if you have hundreds, or even thousands of users. In the rest of this post, we’re going to look at one of the ways you can speed up the process of assigning SharePoint permissions: bulk operations.
You can grant, remove and manage permissions in SharePoint out-of-the-box, but depending on the size of your organisation—in terms of the number of files or number of users (or both)—managing them all individually can be a very time-consuming process. Generally speaking, the bigger the organisation, the more permissions you will have to deal with. Adding 30, 40 or 50 new users to a SharePoint site Members Group, for example, will quickly become a drawn-out, monotonous task.
And that’s before you even factor in varying levels of permissions specificity. Certain lists within a SharePoint site may have fine-grained permissions, while some Site Collections may have subsites with unique or inherited permissions. This can cause problems, as breaking permissions inheritance to use fine-grained permissions gets confusing fast, and can result in your users experiencing slower performance when they attempt to access content on the site.
So, unless you enjoy the process of manually assigning permissions and tip-toeing around permissions inheritance, we suggest applying your SharePoint permissions in bulk.
DeliverPoint, gives users full control over SharePoint permissions management through bulk operations. The copying, transferring, deleting, revoking and granting of permissions can be done in bulk, saving administrators heaps of time while getting the same level of security.
So how do you apply SharePoint permissions in bulk using DeliverPoint? Let’s take a look:
- Copy
Imagine a new employee is joining your sales team. Instead of manually assigning their account every new permission, you can simply copy permissions from an existing member to the new account. By selecting both the new and existing accounts in DeliverPoint, you can select any Subsites, Lists, Folders and Items the initial account has permissions over and transfer them to the new account. In around five minutes, your new team member will have a set of permissions assigned to them. If you then wanted to make any unique changes, you can amend permissions at the individual level.
- Transfer
If an employee is leaving your organisation, a permissions transfer is an effective way to transfer the permissions they had to another user within your SharePoint environment. This is done in the same way: simply select the user you want to transfer permissions from and the user you want to transfer permissions to. And at the click of a button and a couple minutes waiting, those permissions will be transferred.
- Grant
The granting of SharePoint permissions is one area where applying bulk actions comes in most useful. Selecting as many accounts as you wish, you can choose what SharePoint Groups to add them to and what permission levels to grant them (Design, View Only, Edit, Full Control, etc.). You can also specify a duration permissions are active for—perfect for temporary users or if you need to elevate a user’s permission levels for a set duration. This can save big on time; removing the need to grant permissions and then remind yourself to revoke those permissions in a week, a month or a year’s time.
- Revoke
Speaking of revoking permissions, that can also be done in bulk with DeliverPoint. Applying the same method as granting permissions, you can specify which Group or permission level(s) you want to remove from a set of users.
DeliverPoint isn’t solely about bulk permissions. It’s a tool that gives users full control over the management and reporting of their SharePoint permissions. DeliverPoint also includes:
- Azure Active Directory (AD) Groups Enumeration
- In-context reporting and management
- Permissions Inheritance management
- Compare permissions
- Unique permissions reporting
- Permissions cloning
And more. DeliverPoint allows SharePoint Administrators and Site Owners to save on time with bulk operations, while still providing the fine-grained level of permissions management when needed.
Learn more about managing SharePoint Permissions and how to apply permissions in bulk with our helpful how-to tutorial videos.
For more information regarding SharePoint permissions and how DeliverPoint can speed up permissions management in your company, contact us today.
