Access to Default Landing Site without Access to Everything

Question

I have a very basic SharePoint 2010 site collection that was set up as the default Team Site template. My goal is to have domain users be able to navigate to the main landing page of the site collection, but not give them default view access to everything in the site collection.

The name of the Site Collection is Information Services. The main URL for the site collection is sp.mydomain.com/sites/is. Accessing that URL redirects an allowed user to /sites/is/SitePages/Home.aspx.

The Information Services Visitors group grants all Domain Users read access to the site collection. So I started by going to Site Actions -> Site Permissions and removing all permissions for Information Services Visitors. As expected, this blocked them from the site collection entirely. Then, I went into the SitePages library, and explicitly gave the Visitors group read permissions to Home.aspx. That worked, in the sense that any user could navigate directly to /sites/is/SitePages/Home.aspx and view the home page. However, if the user navigates to simply sites/is, they still get an Access Denied message.

So my detailed question, then, is two-fold: What is actually being loaded when a user navigates to /sites/is, that ends up redirecting them to /sites/is/SitePages/Home.aspx? And further, how do I give the Visitors group access to that redirection page, so that when they navigate to /sites/is, they are correctly redirected to the Home.aspx landing page?

Thank you for any insight.

Answer 1

The redirect is controlled by the page, that is done before the page loads. However, you can setup a home page with a redirect page type to control how that works. You will have two redirects in that instance. You have to be sure to grant permissions to that redirect page of course. You will need to enable the publishing features in your site to gain access to that page type (or you could use a javascript redirect embedded on the page).

There are other methods that may be a bit easier to maintain that you may want to consider.

1. Explore using sub-sites with permission sets and related data
2. If you have the ability you can utilize Audiences. Most out of the box webparts allow you to specify an audience filter which can hide/show data based on membership in the audience. Audiences are configured in the user profile service.