Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Thirteen - Permission Settings In List Settings

Introduction

This article is the 13th part of my SharePoint series. Here are my previous articles.

In the previous article, I have explained about saving a list with the template settings available in SharePoint lists and libraries. Now, in this article, I am going to dig for permission on these list settings available in SharePoint for lists and libraries.

In this article, I am going to cover the following topics,

Background
Introduction
Applying permissions in the lists
Breaking default permission inheritance
Deleting the custom permissions
Summary

Background

As we have already seen in previous articles, SharePoint manages its contents in lists and the library. Also as we are in the 21st century, we have to bother about our data because sometime data is sensitive and we do not want to share our data with anyone in the organization except some predefined users. SharePoint is well known for its security related to items. So let’s explore how permissions in SharePoint can help us in securing our data residing in Lists and Libraries.

Introduction

SharePoint allows its users to set the required permissions to the lists and library. The permission might be like you want to hide an entire list or library from particular users, or sometimes you want those specific users to only read the data from the list and many more cases depending on rhe user’s requirement. So for this, SharePoint provides a setting in every list and library using which the user can configure the permissions. This setting is called permission for list setting. We will explore permissions and its type in later articles in this series.

Applying permissions in the lists

Follow the below steps to apply the permissions to the lists.

Step 1

Open the list in which you want to apply the permissions. Click on the settings icon from the top right and then click on List Settings as shown in the figure.

Step 2

This will open up the list settings page. Here, click on Permissions for this list link available under Permissions and Management option.

Step 3

This will open up the list permission setting page as shown in the below figure.

Here you can see in Permission tab, currently, the list is inheriting the permission from its parent site. It means the permissions assigned to the site is applied to the list. There are several groups created by default when we create a new SharePoint site. (We will cover in detail what groups are in upcoming articles in this series). Also, we can see some of the default permission levels in the Permission section. Now when you will click on any of the group it will open up the group explorer view as shown in the below figure.

Here I have opened Team Site Members group. This group contains “Everyone except external users”, it means every SharePoint user in this organization will share the same permission level defined in Team Site member. In the previous image, we can see that the Team Site Members group has “Edit” permission, so members from this group can create and edit the items.

Now you do not want this default permissions settings to apply, and you want to customize the default permissions. What you can do is, create a group and assign a read only permission to the group. Add the users into the group and then add that group to the list only permissions. For customizing the permissions you have to delete the default permissions. In order to delete the default inheritance, we have a concept in SharePoint known as BreakRoleInheritance. Using this functionality the user can break the default inherited permissions and add new custom permissions.

Breaking default permission inheritance

Step 1

Follow the step-1 and step-2 from the above-mentioned steps to open the list permission page.

Step 2

Now click on the “Stop Inheriting Permissions” from the ribbon.

Step 3

Click OK in the alert box. The alert box warns us that now we have to set up our custom permissions.

Now this will stop the default inherited permission. And now you will have a ribbon like this

Click on Grant Permissions menu and grant any user or group to this list permission.

Deleting the custom permissions

Also if you want to revert to the custom permission and want to inherit the site permission again, then in that case just open the list permission page again and click on “Delete unique permissions” menu and the permission will be again set to default. When you click the menu it will show the following alert box.

Just click OK and now you will see the menu is again back to default.

Note: I have used SharePoint list to explain the concept, but the same concept and steps apply to the SharePoint libraries too. So the above article represents permission configurations in both Lists and Library.

Summary

So in this article, we have seen what are permissions to the lists and how it works, also we have seen how we can break default permissions and assign custom permissions. We will explore more about permissions in the later articles in this series. In the current article, I have explained the limited functionality of the lists permission. If you have any query and you want to set some specific permission and you need help then please post your question in the comment section and I will update my article and show you how to solve your problem related to permissions in the list.

In the next article, I will be explaining “Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings” and how it works and how it helps us in organizing our data in SharePoint lists and library.