How to Customize Permissions in SharePoint?

Read time 6 min

A SharePoint server administrator would want to control the access to data by site visitors, users and owners for the sake of good communication and data safety. Based on the priorities and need of the hour, he can assign roles or permissions like Full control, Read, Design, Edit, Contribute, etc. These permissions work as their name suggests. So, let us understand the concept first and then head on to the method to customize permissions.

By default, in SharePoint

• A SharePoint site inherits permissions from the Site Collection’s root site.
• A subsite inherits permissions from its parent site.
• Documents, folders, and lists inherit permissions from their site.

This permission inheritance breaks automatically when any individual item like a document is shared. Although if you break the inheritance and change the permissions, then the shared item would not have those permissions from the parent item. In the coming sections, we will understand how to break the permission heritance, assign unique permissions and edit the permissions.

How to remove permission inheritance in SharePoint Online?

If you want to assign customized or unique permissions to either list, library or survey, first you need to break the permission inheritance. To do this, perform the following steps.

1. Open your SharePoint Online and then select any item from the Document category.
2. Now go to the Settings icon from the right-most pane and select Library Settings option.
3. Then, under Permissions and Management section, select the Permissions for this document library option.
4. Now, within the PERMISSIONS tab, click Stop Inheriting Permissions option.
5. A message will inform that creating unique permissions will not affect this documents library. Click OK to continue.
6. Hence, the permissions inheritance is broken now, and you can create unique permissions for this document library.

How to assign unique permissions in SharePoint Online?

As you have broken the permission inheritance in the previous section, you can now grant the unique permissions to the users. Let us understand the steps.

1. Perform the same steps from step 1 to step 3 to reach the PERMISSIONS tab.
2. Now, click the option Grant Permissions under it.
3. A dialogue box named Share ‘Documents’ and its contents will get open. Here add desired members or groups to the Invite people section. Add a personal message if needed and select the checkbox if you want to share everything in the folder including items with unique permissions. Then click Share option.
4. You will get a notification as:
5. Now, the unique permissions are assigned to the desired users or groups and next we will be learning how to edit the permissions levels.

How to edit permission levels in SharePoint Online?

To edit the permission levels, inheritance must be broken and that we had learned already. So, perform this procedure in sequence to edit permission levels.

1. Again, repeat the steps from Step 1 to Step 3 in the first section to reach the PERMISSIONS tab.
2. Select any user or group and click Edit User Permissions.
3. Now, under the Permissions section, select the permissions which you want to assign and then click OK.
4. Hence, you have changed the permissions for the selected user.

It is also an easy task with SharePoint to remove the assigned user permissions. Just select the user and then click Remove User Permissions option under the PERMISSIONS tab.

To remove the custom permissions set by you and restore the inheritance again, just click the Delete unique permissions option under the PERMISSIONS tab.

Finally, a dialogue box will pop up asking you for the confirmation. Click OK to confirm, and the broken inheritance is restored again.

Hence, these were the main tasks to handle the permissions in SharePoint. Being a smart and secure way of storing large data online, SharePoint attracts a lot of users. Sometimes, users have to migrate from an old version of SharePoint (2010,2013,2016,2019 SharePoint Online(O365)) to a new version of SharePoint (2010,2013,2016,2019 SharePoint Online(O365)). For such users, we have the expert SharePoint Migration tool that offers various migration options to move to SharePoint.

Kernel Migrator for SharePoint is a tool that offers smooth migration from one SharePoint version to another, from the File system to SharePoint, OneDrive or Google Drive and from Exchange/Office 365 public folders to SharePoint. Users can even migrate SharePoint permissions using this tool. The easy user-interface helps for a hassle-free migration of data with complete data integrity. It also migrates versioning of the SharePoint Server. You can get complete details about this software and also download its free demo version for a trial. Buy the tool online if you think it is worth it.

Final Words

SharePoint Server offers many amenities. Out of which, one we have discussed the feature for assigning unique permissions to items. Besides that, a reliable SharePoint migrator tool is also introduced for the users’ migration needs.