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.