Document Library permission issue

Question

I'm having the following issue in terms of using a Document Library.

The company that I work for issues loans to customers and they want to store all that loan customer information in a SharePoint Document Library. There are probably 100,000 customers and up to 1 million documents. They are trying to create a Document Management System (DMS), and they have a requirement where only certain people in certain layer can see a certain document (because some of the documents are confidential depending on some level). Other people can request access to certain documents and they can get a permission from the user that already has access to that document. So he/she can "share" that document with the requestor.

The key thing is that, they don't really wanna put a permission/sharing on each individual document, because there are too many documents and they might eventually lose track of what documents are shared with whom. They are trying to put a filtering Web Part so only through that people can search the document and the Web Part will filter who can see what document, but the issue is that in Document Library people can just type the URL of the document and get a direct access to the document. Since there are no document level permission, we have to give everyone a permission to see all the files in the Document Library.

So my question is, is there any way to disable Document Library direct browser URL access to a document like "http://sharepoint/sites/site1/LoanInformation/Loaninfo12.doc"? Right now we have to set all the documents permission for all users as "Contribute", but they shouldn't see all the documents, because they are suppose to go through the Web Part that filters the document by a secondary list that we come up with? Is there any way to disable direct URL access to a document, but not necessarily giving specific permission to each file?

We are basically trying to trick the user thinking the Web Part search page is the only access to the documents, and you really shouldn't go to "Site Contents -> Document Library" to see all the documents (which everyone has permission to).

What is the best way to accomplish all this?

Answer 1

I don't know if this can help you, but here's anyway:

• You can hide the document library from "Site Contents" by editing the list properties using sharepoint designer.
• The "Read" permission is the way to avoid unwanted manipulation of your list items (You can set the "Contribute" level only to some people, and "Read" for the rest.)
• You can modify too the "Contribute" level (View, add, update, and delete list items and documents) to not allow deletion.