SharePoint 2010 - Document Management - Part 3

Introduction
An important aspect of working with documents is security. You don't want to people looking into confidential documents. To work with security in SharePoint you have to know the basics of the SharePoint security model. There are three security levels in SharePoint:

1. Site (collection)
2. Library or list
3. Item

I wrote a couple of articles about SharePoint permissions. You can find them by clicking here, here or here ;-). I don't want to repeat everything that is mentioned there so I will go straight into the security with document management.

I always advise not to work with item permissions! Setting different permissions for different documents is going to be an administrative disaster. There is no out-of-the-box functionality that provides you with an overview of all documents with broken permissions. Can you imagine you have hundreds of documents and forty-five have different permissions? Good luck with that... 

There is no shame, as I mentioned in my previous post, in creating an additional library. Let's say you have site where you want to store department documents. There are some documents that are only allowed to be viewed by the department members. Just create an additional library for these documents. This document library will automatically inherit the permissions of the site. You can break the inheritance to only provide the department members with the appropiate permissions. This makes administrating permissions a lot easier.

Tips and tricks

The following tips and tricks apply:

Don't use item permissions
Please don't use item permissions, you are going to create an administrative disaster. Is there a demand for securing documents? I always advise to create an additional library with unique permissions.

In my next article I will talk about content types and site columns.

Posted in: Document Management, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2010 Online