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[Video] SharePoint permissions management made easy

In this useful video, we are going to explain how you can use mighty wizards from SPDocKit 5 to easily manage permissions for users in a SharePoint farm.

It’s been a while since we launched new and upgraded SPDocKit 5 – the documentation and management tool for SharePoint! We received some very positive feedback regarding new features which makes us very happy.

We decided to make this introduction video (we recommend to watch full-screen HD version) to show you what it can do for you through five common permissions management scenarios. Take a look and read transcription in which we added some useful links for you to learn even more.

Table of contents:
0:22 Day 1: Site Collection Administrators
2:21 Day 2: Clone Permissions
3:49 Day 3: Grant Permissions
5:27 Day 4: Group Management
6:38 Day 5: Break and Restore Permissions

Video transcription

Hello! Today we are going to explain how you can use mighty wizards from SPDockit 5 to easily manage permissions for users in a SharePoint farm.

In today’s video we’re going to follow Garth. Garth is a SharePoint admin at Contoso Inc. We are going to show you how Garth can utilize SPDockit for his daily tasks through five common scenarios. Let’s go ahead and get started.

Day 1: Site collection administrators

At Contoso, Garth is in charge of the entire farm, with 27 different site collections, and today he was tasked with adding Mary as site collection admin for 25 different site collections. Yeah, we know, that’s a lot of clicking, right?

Here is how you can achieve that goal with minimal effort using our tool:

  • Start SPDockit, navigate to the Permissions Explorer, and click on the Wizards ribbon.
  • Choose the Site Collection Administrators icon and the wizard will start.
  • First, choose the action you wish to perform — we will choose “Set secondary administrator” for this example. Click Next.
  • Now, we need to specify the target — the entire web application in which changes will be made, or just specific site collections within the desired web application. We need to assign Mary to all site collections except “edicovery” and “ContosoPharm,” so we deselected these two.
  • Set who will be your secondary administrator, choosing from the list. Just as in SharePoint, you may specify one user or none, in which case, the secondary administrators of the selected site collections will be removed. Start typing the name (we wanted to find Mary), and choose the person you want. Click Next.
  • The wizard will show you a preview of the changes. For example, here we can see that Mary will replace Brian in some site collections. If everything is ok and you are satisfied with your new settings, click Next and wait for your changes to be applied.
  • That’s it!

Day 2: Clone permissions

A new employee, Katie, has been hired at Contoso. Garth has been tasked with giving her proper privileges for the Finance Team Sites. The only input Garth received was: “she needs to have the same privileges as Chris.”

  • Navigate to the Permissions Explorer and click on the Wizards ribbon.
  • This time we will click on the Clone icon to start the wizard.
  • First, we need to define which site collection will be a wizard scope. Principal’s permissions will be cloned only within this site collection. Click Next.
  • Now we need to select the source principal — we have chosen Chris Johnson, whose permissions and group memberships we wish to clone. The destination principal is Katie Jordan. Be careful because this process will delete the existing permissions for the destination principals you have selected.
  • The wizard will now show you a preview of the changes to be made. This also allows you to modify any settings you might not like. Click Next to apply and finish.

Please note — except for the cloning, you can do something similar using the Transfer option. It is important to note that if you use the Transfer option to accomplish this, the selected source principal will lose all its directly given permissions and SharePoint group memberships in this process, as they will be copied to destination principals.

Day 3: Grant permissions

Granting permissions can be easily done via SharePoint UI, but what should one do when a user needs to be granted very granular permissions? In our example, a user, Shannon, needs to be granted Full Control permissions in all the Finance Reports document libraries in two site collections called Controlling and Finance.

  • Navigate to Permissions Explorer, choose the Wizards ribbon and then click on the Manage icon.
  • In the first step, we need to choose the option “Grant permissions.”
  • The next step allows you to specify the entire web application in which changes will be made or specific site collections or subsites within a desired Web Application. We needed only two specific site collections — Controlling and Finance.
  • The third step allows you to select principals and objects you wish to change. We wanted to apply this change to all lists that matched the name “Finance Reports” in all the Site Collections that we selected in the previous step. Select users to whom you wish to grant the permissions. In our example, we wanted to grant permissions to Shannon.
  • Now we need to select the permission levels that we have to grant to Shannon. Permission levels listed in this step depend on the selected site collection template. Click Next.
  • In the Preview step, make sure that the pending changes will do exactly what you wanted.
  • Apply the changes and voilà!

Day 4: Group management

Garth has been tasked with removing Katie from a number of groups in three site collections. Here is how one of the built-in wizards can help him achieve this task.

  • Start the wizard by clicking on the Membership icon on the Wizards ribbon.
  • Choose the action — in this case, we need to choose “Remove user from all groups.”
  • In the second step, we will specify site collections within the desired web application— IT, Finance and Controlling.
  • Now we need to choose Katie Jordan, a user who we wish to remove from all SharePoint groups within the selected scope in the previous step. Click Next.
  • Now we carefully check the preview of pending changes. If everything is ok, click Next to apply.
  • The last step shows the changes that we made. If any errors have occurred, they will be displayed here. It is possible to save this log to disk as a .txt file using the Save Log button.

Day 5: Break and restore permissions

SharePoint permissions can be broken and restored on individual items such as Sites, Lists, and List Items. To save time doing that item by item, Garth is going to use our built in wizard to restore permission inheritance on all the document libraries named Sales and break permission inheritance for all the Lists names Finance Tasks.

  • Let’s start the Break/Restore Permissions Inheritance wizard from the Wizards ribbon.
  • In this example, we need to restore permissions, so the first thing we should choose in step 1 is “Restore permission inheritance.”
  • Now we will choose the site collections to which we will apply this action — Controlling and Finance.
  • In the configuration step, you can specify which objects this wizard will affect. We wanted to apply this change to all Lists matched by name Sales in all the Site Collections that we chose in the step before.
  • Preview the changes and click Next to apply if everything is okay.
  • Now we will start the wizard again and choose another option, “Break permission inheritance,“ to perform another action.
  • In the target step, we will choose the whole web application. Note that all the subsites that match the specified criteria on the selected web application will be affected.
  • We wish to apply this change on all lists matched by name that contain the term Finance Tasks. So we added this to our configuration options. Click Next.
  • Finally, we check the pending changes and click Next to apply them.

Please check out our other SPDockit videos! We hope you like what we showed you today. If you need help with the application, feel free to contact us.

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