Hello.
I am trying to find a fix for a weird document library permissions and “visibility” issue in SharePoint 2013.
In two examples so far, the client has sites with the usual Owners, Contributing members and Visitors groups. All intended users are members of the appropriate groups. Permissions on document libraries have been separated from the parent, configured so that only specific users can view or modify. Running the “Check permissions” tool on user xyz library produces and confirms “Access for user abc: None”.
Oddly, if users click on “all site content”, they are able to see all document libraries listed. They can see names, tiles for other libraries, total number of items and modified date indicated beside each library tile. This is not good. The client does not want users to see a list of other users’ libraries.
If a user clicks on a document library for another user, the library page displays but items are not visible. That’s a small consolation but still not acceptable.
How do we make it so users do not see other users’ libraries listed in all site content?
Thanks in advance,
Theresa
Afraid not or at least I dont think so. Saw this issue prior to any updates as well as after pu and Oct cu installation.
Hi Henry,
is this something that happened after a update? I am at a client where we have older libraries that work as expected but the new ones have the same issue.
I am thinking it has to do with a update on the SharePoint server.
thanks for helping out
So to confirm the steps that I took to get the desired results in my environment:
Break inheritance on a library and add a user with permissions. This has now added the user at the level above the library with limited access, which is kind of what we would expect but in 2013 you don’t really have visibility of this within the UI.
Go to the level above (so Site in this instance) and add the user in question with what ever permissions your heart desires at the time.
Remove the user and then add the user into the Visitors group in my instance.
Add the user back into the library where inheritance was broken with the desired permissions.
Now everything should be working as expected, although the steps that I took to get this far were certainly far from expected.
So I appreciate this isn’t great and I am sure there are better ways of achieving what was outlined above but it does seem to be consistent and give the behaviour that we are after.
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I have had some slight success. I was reading online about the limited access permission not being visible in the same way as it was in 2010 and saw a post advising on how to remove it. So at the site level, I added in test with read permissions > edited permissions and confirmed that it showed the limited access permission. Removed the user and re-added > confirmed that the user just had read access and not read and limited and I had the desired behaviour.
Now once you have done this for the benefit of removing the limited access permission I was able to add back to the visitors group.
After this I did then seem to have to add the accounts back to the library, so it seemed to remove the user from the entire site collection when I was getting rid of the limited access permissions.
I still don’t feel this is great, but does seem that with this method we can at least get what we are after and some sort of consistency, although why it worked for the last library that had permissions assigned to it before all of this is beyond me. Seems very much hit and miss.
I am going to continue testing.
It is quite alright. I have cheekily mentioned it to my SP2013 course instructor and class mates to see if they can come up with anything. In the meantime I can only think of Audience targeting.
