I have a SharePoint site dedicated to a department. This department site has a branch that needs a couple other users that are not in the department to access information in a sub site. How can I set up permissions in a way that the couple users can access the sub site, but not the main site?
First you need to Stop Inheriting Permissions
on SubSite and then create Groups with unique permissions
Put your external users in SubSite Viewer
.
here is an outline to show you what I meant.
By default, all SharePoint sites inherit its permissions from its parent site.So in your scenario, you just need to
- Stop inheritance, by going to Site Setting > Site permission > From the above ribbon, > Click on Stop inheriting permission.
- Now you can manage the permission for this site uniquely.
- So Create a group with the proper permission then add the users that you need to access the subsite.
- Grant, this group to access subsite.
If you want a completely different set of permissions for http://XXXXXXX/depts/safety than you do for http://moss (and for that matter, http://XXXXXXX/depts/finance), set them up as site collections, with /depts as a wildcard inclusion managed path. That will allow you to keep navigation intact, but have completely different permissions (and site collection administrators) for each department site.
The alternative would be breaking inheritence and creating groups with permissions on the subsite that are not present on the root.
I like Melad's answer, though I add the following:
The new users will need to be given a url for the subsite, as they won't be able to browse to it from the parent site. (because of this difficulty, perhaps consider a different site structure)
The groups on the parent site can also be given permission on the subsite. So, the parent site would have topsite owners, members, and visitors. The sub site would have topsite owners, members, and visitors, and also sub site owners, members, and visitors. Then, add the new users to the appropriate sub site group. This arrangement would give "normal" users the same permissions on the subsite as the parent site, while giving those new users only permission to the subsite.