How To Allow Sharepoint Users Privileges to Access Libraries and Lists (Managing Permissions)

One of the most useful features of Microsoft's Sharepoint is that it provides you the ability to to manage who has access to your documents within the site. This is known as managing permissions. Sharepoint users can be granted different permission levels, including denied access, read only, read and modify, read, and modify and add new. This how-to explains how to grant permissions to document libraries for sharepoint users.

From within the list or document library that you wish to grant the user access to, when logged in with the appropriate priviledges, firstly select Modify Columns and Settings from the bottom of the Select View menu located on the left hand side.

Select Change permissions for this document library

In the centre of this page you will see a list of users who have privileges to access the list or document library. You now have the options to a) Modify existing users privileges b) Delete existing users c) Add new users

a) To modify existing users privileges to allow or disallow write actions for example, select the tick box that corresponds to the user(s) that you want to modify, and select Edit Permissions of Selected Users

b) To remove users completely denying them access to the library, select the tick box that corresponds to the user(s) that you want to delete, and select Remove Selected Users

c) To add users to the sharepoint library or list, firstly select Add Users. A new menu page will appear

Here is where things get a bit tricky. Firstly you need to enter the users name that you want to add. Before you can allow a new user permission to access a sharepoint list or library, you need to have added them as a user for the sharepoint site (click HERE for that how-to). There are two ways that you can identify the the site users that you want to add - either by their email address, or by their username. In most cases it is easier to enter the username, but here is the trick, you MUST enter the username in the format domain\username.  This is a touch painful I know, but that's just the way it is. Our domain is netpoint and our username convention is company.username so the domain (you can cut and paste this bit) will always be netpoint\ . Please note that the slash is a backward slash - very important. After the back slash you can add the username, thus your completed name entry will look like this example netpoint\mtcc.wdowns . You can enter as many users at one time as you like by simply separating their usernames with semicolons ;  .

Once you have entered your usernames, select the radio button for the level of permission that you want them to have, and press Next.

This is the last step when adding users to sharepoint document libraries and forms. Enter the users email address (this may automatically appear), and if you want to you can tell Sharepoint to inform the user by email that they have benn added to the document library or list. When you are finished select Next and you will be returned to the Edit Permissions of Selected Users menu.