Managing subsite permissions

Question

I am trying to allow certain users to access one of the subsites. There is a main Site /MainSite and then a child one /MainSite/SubSite

When I check the site and permissions section I can see there are 3 different groups for each mainsite and subsite: Members, Owners and Visitors.

It doesn't matter if the users are added into the Subsite groups, they still get the

"Sorry, this site hasn't been shared with you."

message when they navigate to the /MainSite/SubSite

How should it be done? Another question: Is it possible to restrict the SubSite only to a couple of users and deny the access to the MainSite?

• User A can access MainSite

• User A cannot access Subsite

• User B can access Subsite

• User B cannot access MainSite

Answer 1

You should follow the following steps:

• break the permissions to subsite.
• then in subsite, remove all the groups from site permissions in site settings
• add groups to this subsite which groups need access this subsite.
• Now these newly added groups removed from the main site. Then the users existed in these groups should not access the main site and access only the subsite.

Site collection administrations have access on everything even though you break the permissions.

Hope this helps to you.

Answer 2

In order to get unique permissions for sites and sub sites it is necessary to break the permission inheritance. To do this follow these steps:

1. Navigate to site settings
2. Click site permissions
3. At the top permissions ribbon there is the option to break inheritance. Click this and confirm you want to break inheritance
4. At this point the people who had permission to the sub sites by default (as they were members of contribute groups on the parent site) still have contribute access on the sub site.
5. Remove any unwanted groups or users from the sub site using the remove permissions and add permissions options.

Answer 3

If you add users to the groups, but they still cannot access the site and get "access denied", you could have some unique permissions at the page level. Make sure your Homepage does not have unique permissions and inherits security from the site.