We have numerous teamsites in our organization, and each one is essentially a department (HR, ITS, etc). Our users cannot modify permissions directly. Rather, we utilize Active Directory to provide access. If a user is part of a department, they have access to their teamsite.
We have found it is beneficial (ie: required) to allow other users OUTSIDE of the department to access and edit documents within a team site. To accommodate for this, we created a 'shared documents' and allows site admins to modify permissions on folders within it. This is the only place they can modify permissions. A caveat of this is that we need to allow all users access to this library by default (SharePoint works this way for library and folder permissions to work), and when the site admins create a folder within this library, they are to break inheritance, add the users they want, and REMOVE the 'all users' group from the folder.
Of course, any permissions management strategy placed in the hands of the end user is disastrous. We have documents open to everyone, constant tickets generated because they don't know what they are doing, etc. We are looking for an EASY way that will allow teamsite admins to share their documents temporarily with other users in various departments, and provide access in an easy to understand manner.
Has anyone had success with this? We thought about workflows, document workspaces, etc, but all seem quite complex to the end user. We don't necessarily care how complex the solution is, as our ITS team can most definitely build it, but it needs to be almost seamless to the end user.
Thoughts on how to provide access to documents within a 'locked-down' teamsite that is easy for the end user?
