Who are Site Collection Administrators? Well, they are not usually part of the IT department but typically perform a daily role in another part of the business such as Sales, Marketing or Operations. Finding an individual within these departments to represent their team by managing the Site Collection is an excellent idea! Why? Because the IT department doesn’t know how every department in the organization works. It is easier to teach a non IT Administrator some basic IT skills than it is to teach an IT Administrator business processes for every department in the company. With that in mind, the IT department should make every effort to make Site Collection Administrators lives easier when they have to deal with the likes of Site Creation, List Management and Permission Management within SharePoint.
Consider the two screens below and imagine that you are a Site Collection Administrator without the ability to look at the Active Directory, gain access to any Server side tools such as ‘Administrator Only’ permission management tools or SharePoint Central Administration. Immediately below is the People and Groups view showing All People who have access to a Team Site called Sales. Can you tell what permission Rob & Brett have to this site?
Ok, perhaps we should click on the Site Permissions link? Oh, but wait, that only shows me a list of SharePoint groups or Domain groups? Which group(s) is Rob & Brett in? What if they are in an Active Directory group which is added to a SharePoint group? Using SharePoint out of the box, you won’t know!
DeliverPoint is not just a Administrators Permission Management tool, it is a tool for SharePoint users and is actually imbedded into SharePoint so that users can gain access to it. Below is a report that your Site Collection administrators can run from the Site Actions menu in SharePoint, with the Actions menu on a list, or from the Edit Control block on a list item or document.
At any level in SharePoint, your Site Collection Administrators can find out which users have access to their sites, lists and list items as well as being able to see how they were granted that permission in the first place!
Need more detail?
From the Account Centric view, you can see the Farm from the perspective of a particular user! Notice that the only site not greyed out in the farm is the Sales site. When performing the Unique Permissions report on the Sales site, you will see all the possible ways that Brett has received permission to the site. The same operation can be performed on the entire farm, or at Site Collection level.
Site Collection Administrators can also be granted permission as a DeliverPoint operator to Copy, Transfer or Delete permissions. In some companies, getting your IT Department to grant a new user permissions to a site can take days or weeks. DeliverPoint empowers the Site Collection administrator the ability to easily perform these operations. Below you can see Bretts permissions being copied to Nick. No matter what permission Brett has to the Site, Nick will receive the same.
Many more expensive tools provide the same ability, but not for Site Collection administrators (The people that need to perform these operations). Other tools are client side tools and sit on the IT teams desktops or even servers.
If you want to know more, please see the following DeliverPoint page and watch the screencasts of DeliverPoint in use: https://lightningtools.com//deliverpoint/sharepoint-permission-management.aspx
We offer a free 30 day trial of the product as well as a 365 day money back guarantee if the product does not resolve your permission management issues.
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