Keeping things nice and simple, just the one document library but since we have several departments who will manage their documents directly it seemed the most sensible way was to add sub folders and assign permissions to each one for editors.  Rather than extend the collaboration to everyone we are keeping the majority of the users on simple read permissions.

First off set the Document Library Permissions

• From your sites homepage click Site Actions, Site Settings
• Under the Site Administration heading click Site Libraries & Lists
• From the Site Libraries & Lists page click Customize “Shared Documents” (or whatever you want to call it)
• Under Permissions and Management heading click “Permissions for this document library”
• If “This library inherits permissions from its parent. (home site)”, disable this by clicking Stop Inheriting Permissions and then Ok
• You should now see that”This library has unique permissions” and you can modify the permissions as you require without inherited permissions confusing things!

We have stuck with a single limited access group which permits all domain users to read the site without having to log in see; http://www.rikzblog.co.uk/?p=257 and each section administrator is added on an ad hoc basis, there’s so few and they’ll change very infrequently it was easier than using groups – for now

Once that has been completed you can now create sub folders if you choose to

• Click Shared Documents
• Under Library Tools, click Documents, and then New Folder.
• Give the New Folder a name and click Save.
• Select the folder (click the check box next to the icon) and click Document Permissions on the ribbon
• Switch off Inheriting Permissions
• Make permission changes as required

You can now delegate management per folder and start uploading documents!  Just be sure to remember to Publish documents otherwise you’ll be like me, spending 20 mins trying to work out what was wrong with permissions, when in actual fact the documents I’d uploaded were still drafts.

Out of the box SP needs users to be authorised – but what if you just want all of your domain users to be able to access the system without password entry?

For all my testing I have a domain user account that shares the same restrictions/properties as the rest of the users, RDP into a different PC logged on as him and test…

So, to grant all domain users read access try the following;

• From your sites homepage click Site Actions, Site Settings
• Under the Users and Permissions heading click Site Permissions
• In our setup I’ve used Home Visitors as the default group,
• Click New, Add Users, Type in “Authenticated Users; domain users” and click the Check Name button, the display should change to show NT_AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users; YOURDOMAIN\domain users, click Ok
• Go back to your test users desktop and try browsing the SP site again, you should now have read access for that account and all domain users.

03/05/11

Came back in to the office today and found my domain user test account unable to access, edited the above to add in domain users also, seems to work now.

I’ve mentioned sharepoint before as it’s been suggested I look into it for document management purposes, but also for other uses (company Intranet, memo broadcast, collaborative working, and so on) so I have setup a version on an old server to give it a try.

There may well follow several small posts as I get int0 using the system, but as a resource the first port of call is to replicate what we use currently (a wordpress blog) for our internal information flow.  That will be pretty easy, as there are just a few posts on, mostly, IT related issues, but there are some other immediate adoptions we can take advantage of;

Standard company documents – currently on our existing Intranet, no easy way for staff to manage

Department pages/areas – intended to provide staff with helpful information and news about the various departments

Manuals/guides – there is a large requirement for this sort of information, some exists but is not widely available

Future requirements – as “new” ideas are formed thus new requirements from an IT service is required, SP represents one of the simplistic customisable options

The only problem is perhaps the confidence required in how to use such a system, but with some generic guidance I’m confident we can get this system used by all departments and start to build the information that we really do need to have in place to improve the efficiency of the group operations.

I’ll keep you posted on that….