Access and Permissions Best Practice

Modified on Wed, 14 Aug, 2024 at 8:51 AM

To keep your contents viewable an editable by members only, we recommend using Teams for Collaboration: Since privacy is a primary concern, using Microsoft Teams for collaboration is a better approach to achieve that. In Teams, you can create channels that would only be accessible to your community members and choose/assign moderators within a channel. This allows members to share and collaborate on documents without exposing content to the broader SharePoint audience.

Managing SharePoint Access: If you still think there is needs to restrict your SharePoint access beyond the default Roles and Permissions, you should be cautious while modifying access right in settings to avoid potential misconfigurations.
- Document Libraries: Store and manage documents within Teams channels or inside the document library, not to confuse with your public library that is accessible to visitors. It means any registered users that has GCX account.
- Notes regarding members access: members will have access to edit your pages and upload documents. However, the visitors will not be able to do so.
- Ensure that the SharePoint site is set to private on team in the manage teams setting. This will allow you to approve membership requests. Setting your SharePoint private does not means no one will see or search and find your community. It means users have to submit request to join and you have the ability to accept or reject the request. In other word, you have control over your community membership.
  - Every SharePoint site is searchable on GCX and visitors will see your membership list, this cannot be hidden.
- Configure Permissions Carefully: This is critical to prevent unauthorized access or issues like owners being unable to upload or manage files. We advise users to not try to reconfigure their permission settings. If users feel that it is necessary to do it, we recommend modifying permission at a smaller scale, test it with users before making further changes. Some changes may be irreversible and our team does not have full access to support permissions issues.
  - While site owners have the ability to assign view only right to members, we highly advised you to be cautious of any changes you want to do on your community as its not part of our best practices on GCX. You may start creating rules that would be very difficult to revert.
- Using Navigation Settings: you can publish pages without adding them to the navigation bar. This keeps them hidden from general view but they are accessible to those who have the direct link or when users go to site pages and look for them.
For more details on who can do what, refer to the roles and permissions in the FAQs (sharepoint.com)
There is also plans in the future to allow Protected B space on GCX. The timelines for protected B will be shared with users when it ready. We anticipate that it will be available by March 2025