Controlling Access to Lists | SharePoint Tutorial pdf

Controlling Access to Lists

Lists inherit permissions from their parent site. You can restrict access to an entire list or to items within a list.
To restrict who has access to a list:
1. On the list toolbar, click Settings -> List Settings and click Permissions for this list under the Permissions and Management heading in the middle of the page.
SharePoint displays the Permissions page.
2. Click Actions -> Edit Permissions. SharePoint displays a warning that you are creating unique permissions.
3. Click OK to proceed. SharePoint changes the display of the Permissions page so that you can edit the permissions.
4. Select a user or group and click Actions -> Remove User Permissions to remove access to the list for those users as shown in Figure.
Figure1:  Restricting access to a list

Figure1 shows removing permissions for all users except the Administrator. That means only the Administrator can see the list; it is hidden from everyone else and if they try to access it SharePoint displays an Access Denied page (Figure2). Those two points confuse some folks:
=> In SharePoint, you generally can’t see what you can’t access. That means some lists, libraries, and sites may not appear on the Quick Launch or link bar for some users.
That makes instructing users interesting sometimes!
=> The Access Denied page lets you sign in as a different user. Most folks only have one account, so that makes little sense to them. But when you’re helping someone, it’s handy to sign in as yourself, grant them access and then sign out by closing the browser (be sure to do that so they don’t proceed with your credentials).
Figure2: What the user sees if he/she doesn’t have permissions to access something

You can also restrict access to individual items in a list. To do that:
1. Click Manage Permissions on the list item’s Edit menu as shown in Figure 3.
2. Follow the same steps as for restricting access to a list.
Figure3: Use the edit menu to restrict access to individual items

Notice that I’ve only talked about restricting access. Actually, you can increase permissions as well but that’s a much less common practice. In general, permissions are more restricted the deeper you go in to a site hierarchy.
Part of the reason for that is simplicity – its way too hard to remember how permissions are set if they don’t follow the physical structure. The other reason is visibility: as I mentioned above, SharePoint hides restricted items, so if a user has read access to a list within a site that he/she can’t see…it’s very hard for that user to find that list.