Setting permissions on multiple documents

Question

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 11:53 AM}

Within a document library we have a subset of documents to which we want to give read-permissions to users outside our team. I have created a group for the outside users and now want to modify the document permissions so the group can read them, however, it appears that Document Permissions can only be set for one document at a time (option disables as soon as more than one document is selected in the library).

As the subset of documents is large (and SharePoint is slow) it is not acceptable to have to set permissions one document at a time.

What are my other options for making a subset of my library documents visible to a group?

All replies (11)

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 1:09 PM ✅Answered | 1 vote}

Hi,

  If you can able to Segregate the document with the access level and group of users then you can Create a Document Set for different group and place the document inside this document set. Then you can set the permission to the Document Set which will get inherit to the documents inside.

R.Mani http://rmanimaran.wordpress.com

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:12 PM}

Hello PDOF.

You know that if you want to grant specific permissions to a document library's (or to a list's) item the first step to take is to break the permissions inheritance for that item.
After that, you should write a Powershell script that takes a list of the files in the document library and changes the permissions for all the listed files.

Bye.

Luigi Bruno
MCP, MCTS, MOS, MTA

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:13 PM}

Hi,

  Set the Permission in the Document Library level. No need to set in the Document level.  Setting the permission to Library level will inherit to Document level , unless you override individual item level.

In the Library Settings --> Select Permission for this Document Library .

Map your group with Read Permission.

Now the users in the group will have read permission in that library.

R.Mani http://rmanimaran.wordpress.com

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:37 PM}

Thanks Luigi but scripting is not an option - I can't expect end users to learn how to do that. This is likely to be an ongoing requirement (with different groups and document subsets defined as needs arise) so we can't ask support to keep writing new scripts every few days).

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:42 PM}

Thanks but the new group should only have the facility to read a subset of the documents in the library - not all the documents. I filter the documents to the ones the group needs to read, select them all, but then cannot set permission (option disables if more than one document is selected).

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:49 PM | 2 votes}

You are aware that extensive use of item level permissions wihin a web application (technically within a content database) will result in a performance impact for all users?

A much more elegant approach would be to use either a seperate document library or a folder to contain the 'shared' files.

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 2:07 PM}

We have set the document libraries to be logical groupings for members of the department. We now want to allow a small number of staff external to the department to view a small subset of the documents. Isn't this what SharePoint is about, making it easy to share/collaborate without resorting to emailing documents?

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 2:14 PM}

Thanks for the document set suggestion. I haven't used these before. Do the documents added to the set still reside (and remain visible as individual documents) in the library? Is it easy (for end users) to assign documents already in the library to the document set?

The goal is for the documents and library to work exactly as they do now but simply to let a few people outside the department view the 30 or so documents relevant to them without the tedium of setting the permissions individually.

_{Wednesday, February 19, 2014 2:27 PM}

Document sets are a more evolved verison of folders, which answers your question in that you'd have to move the items into the folder and by default they wouldn't appear on your normal view.

You could correct this by setting your default view to 'display items without folders' which will show items in document sets/folders as if they were in the root. To get something into the folder/doc set they would have to switch to another view.

With 30 items i'd just do it manually.

_{Friday, April 29, 2016 2:16 PM}

Hi all,

Just wanted to add a couple of comments.

We had a similar problem here setting item level permissions, and ended up buying a 3rd party program from BoostSolutions called Item Permission Batch (I think they renamed it SharePoint Permission Boost now).

Our permissions scenario involved form libraries. We have one library per form that stores the form submissions for everyone. Take for example our requisitions. We don't want everyone in the company to see everyone else's requisitions. We just want the initiator, the manager, and the finance reps to see the submitted form. And since we didn't want to create 300 libraries with 300 workflows for each employee to store their own requisitions, we have the form submit to one requisition library, and the workflow sets permissions.

The catch is if, say, a new manager is hired and he/she wants to see the past requisitions submitted by their employees. Or a new administrative assistant is hired who needs to see the forms everyone in the department submitted in order to run reports or answer questions. Granting permissions to all the forms each employee in the department submitted (because you don't want these people to see the whole company's requisitions) could result in having to set permissions - one at a time - on well over 100 individual forms. That's crazy.

So BoostSolutions Item Permission Batch lets admins select any number of items and set permissions on just those items. Or you can tell it to grant Bob Johnson "contribute" permissions to all items created by Joe Durst. It's pretty nice.

We don't use that feature very often, but it's been awesome when the need arises.

However, we're looking to move to SharePoint Online/365, and BoostSolutions isn't an option. So...I may have to look into Document Sets or something else, because I don't want to have to set permissions one at a time on a zillion forms.

_{Friday, April 29, 2016 3:39 PM}

Document sets are identical to Folders for managing permissions. If you can do it with folders then the document sets won't make a difference.

I don't know of any good solutions for O365 that do what you describe, except for paid ones like DocAve. Boost might have a 365 version as well.

You can do it through PowerShell or C# but it's probably the sort of thing that you'll need to do on a semi-regular basis and for that a full application might be nicer to use.